Wednesday, January 05, 2005

The media: Anti-semitic, anti-Israel

Courtesy the Powerliners and Cornerites, The Monk found Melanie Phillips' tremendous speech about media bias against Israel and how it has infected her home country of the UK, formerly Israel's second-best friend. (For more on the virulent anti-Israel sentiment in the UK, see here).

The Powerliners note that: "Phillips' article is titled: 'The Reporting of Iraq and Israel: An Abuse of Media Power.' Her focus is Great Britain, but what she says is also applicable to the American press."

And here is her thesis:

How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view – hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles -- that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy – Israel – that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?

Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.

This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them.

Read the whole piece.

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