In an interesting development at the militantly anti-Zionist London Review of Books (LRB), the magazine is no longer to receive funding from the UK Arts Council’s regular donor programme. This follows years of campaigning by a variety of individuals and organisations, most notably in the last couple of years by the media monitoring watchdog Just Journalism, who have berated the Arts Council for channeling public funds into an agenda driven media outlet.

I spoke to the LRB, which denied that its anti-Zionist agenda had had anything to do with it: “The Arts Council never raised this as a subject,” said Nicholas Spice from LRB, claiming that the reason LRB was no longer going to get public funds in the manner it had previously obtained them was simply because they had decided not to apply for them. Hmmm. That would be very strange indeed since Spice acknowledged that LRB was loss making!

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Now this is not the kind of instance of BBC bias to have you performing a karate kick at your TV set. But in its way, it tells you a lot about the propagandistic mindset that rules the BBC newsroom. After yesterday’s bomb attack in Jerusalem — such attacks are always carried out by “militants”, according to the BBC, not “terrorists” — a line of vital context is introduced in the reporting to tell readers that bomb attacks are much less common than they used to be.

“Jerusalem suffered a spate of bus bombings by militants between 2000 and 2004, but attacks had stopped in recent years,” the report said. What? They just “stopped”? Like yesterday afternoon it “stopped” raining? An act of God, perhaps? As fully paid up opponents of the security barrier and of pretty well every other security measure taken by Israel in recent years the BBC knows full well what it is doing here.

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British understatement is a wonderful thing. Here is how Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, introduced a posting on the magazine’s website on Friday: “It’s a funny old world,” he said, “I have now been contacted by two journalists informing me that Bedfordshire Police are investigating The Spectator”. The reason? Because a group called, wait for it, “Muslims4UK” took exception to a piece by Melanie Phillips on her Spectator blog in which she referred to the Arabs who had murdered five members of a Jewish family in Itamar the week before as “savages”.

The story was reported in the media, but if you’d blinked you’d have missed it, and the slant of the reporting was that Israel was at least as much to blame for the killings — due to settlement policy — as the killers themselves. Melanie’s column was a typically robust effort to point out the moral depravity of news outlets such as the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN and the BBC who, if the situation had been reversed — if five Arabs including a three month old baby had been knifed to death in their beds in a lethal racist attack by Jewish “settlers”, for example — would have given it saturation coverage.

So not so much a “funny old world” as a “brave new world”: a prominent British columnist does what prominent British columnists are supposed to do — she attempts to shift the terms of the debate back on to a more rational and principled footing — and the net result is that the police have been called in, with the Guardian newspaper cheerleading on the sidelines, because she has offended Muslim sensitivities.

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Regular readers of this website will be aware of a line I frequently refer to in exposing the blatantly propagandistic approach taken by the BBC in its reporting of Israel. It appeared again following the Itamar massacre of five Jews in a West Bank “settlement” last week. The settlements, the BBC said, “are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this”. In its construction, the logic of the sentence may be compared to something like this: “The square root of nine is three, according to basic mathematics, though Robin Shepherd disputes this.” In both cases a proposition is established as being beyond all reasonable dispute. It is then pointed out that there are some (weird or wicked or possibly deviant) types out there that have the temerity to take a different view. This is called giving both sides of the argument, though it is deliberately done in such a way as to make a categorical statement about who is right and who is wrong: Robin Shepherd is a mathematical dunce; the Israelis are shameless criminals.

At this point one could take the discussion in several directions. But, unfolding right before our eyes (NB: See postscript below following UN vote) , there is a fine (if that’s the right word) illustration of the futility of using “international law” in this manner as Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi slaughters his own citizens in broad daylight while the world twiddles its thumbs because China and Russia refuse to give “legal authority” to any form of intervention via the UN Security Council. Ponder that thought:

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The appalling slaughter yesterday of an entire Israeli family of five, including a baby and a three year old, provides a terrible reminder of what the people of the Jewish state continue to face at the hands of Palestinian terrorism. It appears that they were all stabbed to death in their sleep in the West Bank “settlement” of Itamar. Given the successes of the Israeli security services in clamping down on terrorism such events are less common than they used to be, and it is always worth reminding ourselves that it is precisely such security measures that many western governments and large sections of the political intelligentsia consistently oppose.

Nonetheless, terrorists do sometimes still get through. The story isn’t getting much prominence, but given the Japanese tsunami that is perhaps understandable. One thing that is noteworthy, however, is that in so far as it is being reported at all one crucial piece of context is being missed, as it always is in reports about Palestinian terrorism or “militancy” as the BBC prefers to call it.

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