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Posted on 07/10/2003 8:53:59 AM PDT by yonif
Israel's ambassador in London Zvi Stauber boasted this week that his embassy has been "maintaining close relations with the BBC."
What is the value of such "close relations" if the result is that this great radio and TV network displays unceasing hostility toward Israel and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?
Ambassador Stauber's strange claim - directed to the Foreign Ministry - was intended to protest Jerusalem's justified official censure of the BBC, which came after a repeat broadcast on the British World Service of a program about the danger Israel ostensibly poses because of nuclear weapons supposedly produced in the Dimona reactor.
It is likely that Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw have been influenced over the years by the BBC's reporting. During the Anglo-American war against Saddam British leaders hurriedly demanded that Israel be the one to give in to Palestinian demands. The British government attempted to make Israel pay the price for British intervention in Iraq, in the false hope of appeasing the Arabs in the Middle East and their supporters in London.
Prime Minister Sharon's visit to London next week, at Blair's invitation, will without doubt help clear the air between London and Jerusalem. The road map, which Sharon took upon himself in full coordination with Washington, will obviously form the basis of a frank conversation between the two prime ministers, the friendly kind they have held in the past in London and Jerusalem.
Blair will hear Sharon explain why Israel is insisting on its 14 reservations regarding the road map. These reservations are particularly important in light of the terror groups, which are exploiting the cease-fire in order to arm themselves for the continuation of the war.
Even the systematic demonization of Israel by the BBC - from their pseudo-documentary programs to Tim Sebastian's interviews - cannot undermine the forthcoming Sharon and Blair talks. Outgoing British ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles spoke warmly this week in praise of Sharon's leadership in a way that could teach Ambassador Stauber something.
The British ambassador spoke of how he had brought Sharon a book about Scottish villages. When Sharon looked at a picture of a farmer shoeing a horse, he commented: "I am apparently the only prime minister in the world who knows how to shoe a horse - perhaps Golda Meir also knew how to do so."
JUST AS IN the famous Jewish legend of the Golem of Prague, the monster has risen against its creator: The BBC is now at the center of a bitter, vocal confrontation with Blair and Straw. They are accusing the network of untruthful reporting regarding their intelligence assessments on the eve of the war in Iraq. This is not at all surprising.
After all, it was the commander of a British aircraft carrier who discontinued BBC broadcasts from his warship because his men could not stand the network's biased broadcasts. Blair and other British patriots are now experiencing what many Israelis have felt in the face of unceasing BBC slander against the Jewish state.
I take no malicious delight over Blair and Straw's plight, but neither do I spill any tears over it.
In the spring of 2001 I was approached by people from the BBC and asked for an interview about Ariel Sharon's role as defense minister at the time when Lebanese Christians massacred Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla, in Lebanon in September 1982.
"We are preparing an objective documentary," the producers claimed. "I don't believe you," I replied. "You want to interview me in order to appear to be objective."
Then I said: "I have no doubt that you want to harm Sharon because he was elected prime minister; to slander him for something he was not involved in, in Lebanon 19 years ago."
Indeed, when the program was broadcast it consisted entirely of a bogus indictment against Sharon and a character assassination of a prime minister who had been elected in a landslide victory.
It therefore came as no surprise that at the same time the BBC broadcast its program, Palestinians, with the support of anti-Semites in Belgium and Israeli leftists, submitted an "indictment" against Sharon in Brussels for supposed "war crimes."
I therefore know from personal experience that the network would not hesitate to broadcast - in the guise of objective journalistic investigation - anything that would blacken Israel's name. They did it again in the malicious film about the Dimona reactor, whose secrets were ostensibly sold to The Sunday Times for $200,000 by a traitor, Mordechai Vanunu.
This is what happens when a few irresponsible journalists, editors, and critics acquire such power as to make them think they know how to run the world better than democratically elected governments.
London, the seat of the mother of parliaments, can now see for itself how a runaway monster set out to destroy 10 Downing Street and bury Tony Blair under the ruins.
The writer is Israel correspondent of The New York Post.
Or as in an X-files episode ;^)
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