More Anti-Israel Bias

Late last month, the U.K. branch of Amnesty International hosted a Middle East Monitor Online event (also sponsored by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign) called "Complicity in Oppression: Does the Media Aid Israel?". Given the history of press bias against Israel, as Mark Tapson of FrontPageMagazine says, "one could be forgiven for suspecting that an event with a title this absurd must have been an evening of standup comedy."

In a sense it was:

• A university prof argued that "the Israeli side is relentlessly churned out while the Palestinian narrative is rarely put forward"


• A former BBC executive, previously based in Palestine, charged that "BBC is failing to tell us the truth." (The same executive once called former White House Middle East envoy Denis Ross "not just a Jew, [but] a Zionist propagandist.")


• A Palestinian spokesman complained that he "was given almost no airtime on many high profile news outlets at the time of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in the winter of 2008-9."

You get the idea.

Middle East Monitor Online (MEMO) itself is laughable. Earlier this year, it published an article calling Israelis "pathological liars from Eastern Europe." According to the Telegraph (U.K.), MEMO:

is run by one Dr Daud Abdullah, the deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a signatory of the Istanbul Declaration. This gothic document states that it is the obligation of the "Islamic Nation" to "carry on jihad and Resistance" against Israel and to fight "by all means and ways" any "foreign warship" attempting to block arms smuggling to Hamas, which, last time I checked, was still a terrorist organisation according to EU and UK law.

The meeting's sponsors said the Telegraph's factual article was itself an example of press bias. A liberal blogger described publications disputing the meeting's premise as an attempt to "shut down debate."

Amnesty International is anything but an honest broker. It routinely fails to distinguish between aggression and self defense. After Israeli soldiers fired on more than 300 Syrian and Palestinian protesters who swarmed the border and infiltrated Israel, AI condemned Israel. And it fingers Israel for a disproportionate share of human rights violation charges. Making AI the poster child for NOfP's rule: "The number of human rights violations in a country is inversely proportionate to the number of human rights complaints about that country."

So it was a comedy: a bunch of anti-Israel groups holding a press event to prove press pro-Palestinian bias. AI and the others can neither recognize their own bias nor credit Israel's humanity. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

(via Maggie's Farm)