In a deeply disturbing move that marks the end of any pretence at impartiality as well as another new low in British attitudes to Israel, Amnesty International’s UK branch has now indicated that it endorses the notion that Israel is an apartheid state.

For an event scheduled for October 28 entitled “Discriminatory and unsustainable: Water and politics in Israel & the Occupied Palestinian Territories” Amnesty has revealed that its keynote speaker will be Ben White, author of “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide” which was published in June by Pluto Press.

On its website, Amnesty is promoting White’s book and describes him as “a writer and freelance journalist specialising in Palestine/Israel.”

In fact, White is an anti-Israeli ideologue whose book is riddled with distortions aimed at smearing the Jewish state by association with apartheid South Africa. In promoting his book and honouring him as keynote speaker, Amnesty has endorsed the legitimacy of the apartheid analogy in relation to Israel and thus placed itself inside the extremist wing of the anti-Israel camp.

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Anyone who has followed developments in Russia over the last few years had to be sceptical that the Obama administration’s decision to scrap missile defence facilities in central and eastern Europe would really yield the hoped for response from Moscow in securing meaningful sanctions against Iran.

Appeasement would never work, we all said. Isn’t it blindingly obvious that the people who run modern Russia see themselves as locked in a zero sum, geo-political game with America and the wider West?
Didn’t Obama understand that Moscow sees the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran as negative for the United States but neutral or positive for Russia?

Still, there was always that nagging sensation of doubt. Surely, given the stakes, Obama would not humiliate staunch American allies like the Czechs and the Poles without a cast iron commitment from Russia to shift its position on Iran. Surely the Russians had been persuaded that they must now come into line allowing the prospect of serious sanctions to at least be put on the table. Surely the scrapping of missile defence was part of a grand bargain even if, following diplomatic protocol, the Americans would never say so publicly. Surely Obama knew what he was doing.

Yesterday, that debate appeared to come to an end with the following words from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We are convinced,” he said, “that threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure in the present situation are counter-productive.”

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NOTE TO READERS: An alert reader of this site pointed out that in the original version of this story I had characterised Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami as “Iran’s supreme leader”. This was an error. Khatami is a highly influential cleric but he is not the supreme leader. That dubious distinction belongs, of course, to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I have therefore corrected the story accordingly.
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In another one of those stories that doesn’t quite fit the prevailing narratives in much of the West these days and thus went largely unreported, it has emerged that one of Iran’s top spiritual leaders, Ayatollah Khatami, used his speech at Friday prayers last week to mock the United States and its allies over Iran’s nuclear programme while repeating old mantras about the destruction of Israel.

According to a dispatch from memri.org (see link below), Khatami scoffed at talks in Geneva the week before last which western leaders and their supine media supporters had hailed as a potential breakthrough in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

On the contrary, Khatami said: “The meeting was a great victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran to such an extent that even the Western and Zionist media had to admit defeat.”

And, he went on:

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Even the Guardian had to admit that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was “ludicrously premature”. I prefer the version I offered to Forbes Magazine yesterday who quoted me as describing the move as “infantilism” and “soft-bellied adoration of an untested president”.

But after the weasel words of pseudo-criticism the Guardian, in an editorial today, was back to enforcing the kind of narrative which informs the thinking and prejudices of most of the world’s international institutions these days, the Nobel committee included.

Indeed in a we’ve-given-you-this-prize-now-we-own-you kind of way, the paper sought to remind the 44th president that he would still have to prove his worth as a figurehead for bien pensant pieties in a number of areas. First in the line of fire was, of course, Israel.

“Take the Middle East,” the Guardian noted in tones of fake admonishment, “where Mr Obama’s Cairo speech in June was stirring in explaining how Palestinians had “suffered in pursuit of a homeland”, but the desperate conditions in Israeli-blockaded Gaza have not since improved one jot. Indeed the president has failed to secure even a temporary pause in Israeli building in the occupied West Bank.”

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UPDATE to this entry:

Many thanks to everyone who has participated in this discussion. I have no intention of going to court with anyone unless it comes to a clear case of personal denigration. I guess my point in raising this subject was to try and get a sense of what readers think to be the best course of action when one’s arguments are misrepresented and the media outlet in question refuses a right to reply. The fact is, of course, that both Antony Lerman and the Guardian have made fools of themselves by their behaviour.

They have shown themselves to be incapable of meeting basic standards of fair dealing with the arguments of someone who does not share their policial views and prejudices. That says a lot about them and very little about me and my arguments. They are frightened and weak and have revealed themselves as such. In the end, that damning indictment is something they have brought upon themselves. Let the matter rest there…

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Let me say from the outset, that as a former journalist I am instinctively opposed to the use of legal or statutory remedies to sort out disputes in the public domain. Bad arguments, even hateful and defamatory arguments are best met with better arguments not with recourse to the courts. But what happens if your right to reply is refused? What happens if you are cut off in a broadcast and your character or motives are impugned? What happens if you are left with the choice of taking it on the chin and getting no redress or taking action?

I do not know the answer. But since publishing A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel a couple of weeks ago, I have personal reasons for wanting one. Of course, this is not simply a problem for me. Many others have suffered abuse and misrepresentation for calling for a more reasoned approach to Israel.

It is in the interests of the wider issue, therefore, that I offer an account of the way I was treated in today’s Guardian and then by its editorial team which refused my request for a proper response to a wholly distorted rendition of one of my arguments. This was compounded by implied defamation in the comments section.

I would be grateful for thoughts in my own comment section below as to what readers think, both about the case in point and the broader question of what to do about it. (There is another pertinent issue which would add to the discussion involving LBC Radio but it is now in the hands of the UK’s broadcast standards commission, Ofcom. I cannot, therefore, comment at this stage.)

Since it is impossible to be objective about a case involving oneself, I offer the following version of events from Cif Watch, an important new website which monitors anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic articles and remarks on the Guardian’s Comment is Free (Cif) website.

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