On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary programme Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.

Entitled “A Walk in the Park” — a reference to the parkways which link settlements across East Jerusalem — the programme was introduced by veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Vine: “Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes; Israelis are moving in, even underground,” he tells us. The drama then shifts to Jerusalem itself where Jane Corbin, narrator and reporter on the ground, is ready to begin a demolition job all of her own.

Right away, the documentary cuts to the destruction of a Palestinian home: “…roads were sealed. The Israelis don’t make it easy to see what’s going on,” we are ominously told as she skips daringly down a dirt track to avoid the watchful eye of the dastardly Israelis.

So why, one wonders, would the Israelis be so keen to hide their dirty little secret? “Under international law,” she tells us earnestly, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory; its status shouldn’t be changed.”

Well, good to know that we haven’t wasted much time before she introduces her very own, and quite definitive, interpretation of international law. But objective versions of the law are soon complemented by a historical narrative which forms the backdrop to the entire programme:

“When the State of Israel was born in 1948, Jerusalem was divided,” says Corbin. “The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours.”

And that’s it. That is the broad historical context offered to a prime time British audience on the BBC’s most prestigious weekly documentary programme. Is her version accurate? Well, yes, modern day Israel was formed in 1948 and Jerusalem was indeed divided — Jordan on the one side and Israel on the other. It is also true that “following war” with its Arab neighbours in 1967 East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel.

But as an instance of propagandist methodology in airbrushing out vital context, especially in a documentary about the status of Jews in Jerusalem and the underlying causes of the wider conflict, this really rather takes the biscuit.

Consider another way of phrasing that paragraph which, once again, is vital to the documentary since it serves as the key context for a largely uninitiated British audience. Try this, with the salient points in italics:

“When the State of Israel was born in 1948 — following Arab and Palestinian rejection of a peace agreement accepted by Israel which would have seen the internationalisation of the city — Jerusalem was divided. The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan — which expelled Jewish residents and forbade Jews from praying at all of the city’s holy sites. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours. That war was caused by Arab governments and the Palestinians who had the aim of eliminating the state of Israel in its entirety and expelling its Jewish residents.”

Well, that would really cast a different light on things wouldn’t it?

Next we come to Corbin’s “walk in the park” which starts in Sheikh Jarrah and winds its way through the Mount of Olives and Ras al Amoud to Silwan.

Stopping off in Ras al Amoud the documentary now introduces “an Israeli lawyer”, who serves throughout the programme as the objective analyst providing a neutral point of reference to enhance the credibility of the narration.

That Israeli lawyer is none other than, Danny Seidemann, a well known (but not to British viewers) left-wing lawyer-activist. No countervailing Israeli opinion from a similar kind of source is offered.

But the slippery and blatantly biased tactics of the programme makers are immediately revealed as the objective reference point offered by Seidemann is then counterbalanced by the opinion of an Israeli, Arieh King of the Israel Land Fund.

A purportedly neutral anti-settlement view is thus juxtaposed with the views of an interested party whose work we are told (to a background of darkly melancholic music), “is paid for by wealthy backers [ie Jews] in America and Europe.”

We have also been offered another piece of “context” for viewers to mull over as they watch the programme: “Peace deals proposed so far reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.”

Hmm. I wonder what’s missing from that one then? Again, here’s another way of putting that point with my suggested additions in italics:

“Peace deals proposed so far — all of which were rejected by the Palestinians – reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.”

The omission is so blatant it is almost laughable. In this desperate attempt to support the long-standing BBC narrative that Israeli “occupation” forms the root cause of the conflict, it has become necessary to mention peace deals without pointing out that such peace deals were offered by Israel but flatly rejected (in favour of violence, one might add) by the Palestinians. To raise that issue would clearly undermine the ideological edifice. It would suggest that the root cause of the conflict is Palestinian rejectionism and anti-Semitism — two concepts that the BBC is apparently unable to deal with.

The distortion is reinforced as we then move to a catalogue of instances of how settlement policy is making a two state solution difficult if not impossible.

Harrowing stories are told of Palestinians kicked out of their homes. The briefest of references is made to the claim of the settlers that they are taking back land and property which was seized from them by Jordan in 1948. But it is done in such a away that no lay audience could possibly see any real justification for the settlers’ position.

We are told of, and shown, instances of Palestinians being thrown out of homes they have “lived in for generations”. This is stated as fact by the narrator. When the counter argument, that the land they have lived on was stolen from Jews in the first place, this was ventured as the mere opinion of Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem.

Arriving in Silwan, the narrator just happens to drop in at the very moment a Palestinian house is being demolished. A Palestinian activist, Jawad Siyam, is given prominence as the articulate and reasoned voice of the oppressed. He cries out: “It’s the most racist state in the world, you see…” Pointing to Israeli policemen he adds: “You are the most racist people in the world.”

No voice from the Israeli side is offered to protest about terrorism, and Palestinian anti-Semitism is referred to so obliquely that practically no-one could pick up on it as a significant issue. With the historical context largely obliterated earlier in the programme, few uninitiated viewers could disagree with Siyam’s diatribe.

Fading in the melancholic music again, we are then told ominously that many of the settlers come from abroad as we are introduced to the Adlers, a family of American religious Jews who have settled in Silwan. (American, religious, Jewish and settlers? That’s the sort of combination that gives BBC reporters sleepless nights).

As a warning of how Israeli policy is leading to tensions, we are later introduced to a Palestinian man, Ahmed, (complete with close-up of crying son) who was shot in the right thigh by an Israeli following a scuffle. No instance of Palestinian violence is offered here for balance. Ahmed then tells of how the Israeli stepped over him and “shot a child”.

As the documentary draws to a close, the narrator once again interjects with her own tendentious opinions: “Those who know Jerusalem warn that this is a powder keg,” she says. “More than the city could be ignited if the Israelis persist in what they are doing.”

“Those who know Jerusalem?” Who might that be then? We cut back to Danny Siedermann, the BBC’s objective analyst of events. Widening the discussion and placing responsibility for the overall conflict squarely with Israel, he says: “This is the volcanic core of the conflict…what begins in Jerusalem doesn’t stay in Jerusalem.” He adds darkly that regimes could be destabilised from Pakistan to Morocco in the ensuing cataclysm.

Finally we move to the wider settlements outside Jerusalem and “The Wall”. Corbin concludes the documentary with the words: “The face of the city is changing and that makes the chances of peace even more remote.”

Well, you get the picture. Obviously the issue of Jerusalem excites passions inside Israel and outside it. Reasonable people can disagree on it. There are many shades of opinion to be assessed. And there is no reason why a BBC documentary should not reflect that. The problem is that the documentary does not reflect that reality at all.

Every Jewish step in East Jerusalam is presented as wrong and dangerous. All the important context has been removed. A clear ideological agenda has been pushed at the expense of basic standards of fair reporting.

Welcome to the world of the BBC. And welcome to yet another illustration of the slippery path to the deligitimisation of the world’s only Jewish state.

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I watched this documentary so you don’t have to. But suckers for punishment (at least those resident in the UK) can see it in full at the following link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pznkh

To purchase my recent book on the wider issues, click here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0297856642/ref=pd_ts_b_4?ie=UTF8&s=books

Note to readers: This issue was first brought to light by HonestReporting. The link to their report is in the second comment below)

When the Guardian’s assistant editor slithers his way on to the BBC, there’s a good bet that something noxious is soon going to be coming across the airwaves. But, in its brazen and flagrant dishonesty, Monday’s contribution to BBC Radio London’s Breakfast Show by Michael White is something to behold.

In a discussion on security for political leaders pegging off the assault on Silvio Berlusconi the other day, White talked meanderingly about previous attacks on political leaders and, understandably for a British discussion show, brought in the case of Northern Ireland where Unionists and Nationalists in the main desisted from assassinating each others leaders. And then, like a flash of lightening out of a clear blue sky, this:

“In Israel they murder each other a great deal. The Israeli Defense Forces murder people because they don’t like their political style and what they’ve got to say and it only means that people more extreme come in and take their place.”

No interruption from the BBC moderator of course — apart from an approving “hmm”. No one to stop such appalling, defamatory lies in their tracks. There it is. On the record. A vicious calumny about Israel, pumping yet more sewage into the public mind as the Jewish state is portrayed as nothing better than a violent, totalitarian dictatorship which silences political dissent through the barrel of a gun.

To see just how mendacious White is being it is necessary to recall Israel’s policy of targeted assassination which was aimed at senior leaders of the terrorist infrastructure, mainly in Hamas. This, of course, would be White’s pseudo-defence.

But he and everyone else who follows the situation in the Middle East knows very well that democratic, pluralist Israel has never murdered anyone just because it doesn’t like “what they’ve got to say”. Or perhaps he is using the word “style” in a grotesque attempt at humourising the explosive belts packed with nails and ball bearings worn by suicide bombers by equating them to fashion accessories?

Friends and colleagues from outside the UK frequently ask me how intelligent people in Great Britain can really believe the kind of absurdities that Israel is charged with these days. What is hard to convey to them is the sheer casualness of the way such lies and distortions are now spread by Britain’s most powerful media outlets.

The extract quoted above is no more than 15 seconds in length. It is not the centre-piece of the show. There was no great fanfare announcing it. It is a quite casual reference, dropped on to the breakfast tables of London. People absorb this sort of thing day in day out. After a time, it simply becomes normal. This is how a nation’s reputation is being destroyed.

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To hear the extract — which will only be up for a limited time — click on the following link and move to 1 hr, 18 minutes and 50 seconds into the discussion:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p005gypm

This Monday, Britain’s Channel 4 TV aired a landmark documentary alleging that Jewish lobby groups have sunk their claws so deep into the British establishment that politicians have no choice but to toe their line, and that the media has been cowed into submission. It is easy to laugh, but we should not. The documentary has provoked a new wave of virulent anti-Semitism and threatens to silence Israel’s few supporters in Britain once and for all. I have an op-ed on the subject in tomorrow’s edition of the Wall Street Journal Europe which is now published on the paper’s website.

Click here to read it, and then please come back to my site to leave your own comments outlining what you think:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574543671980025770.html

It is being reported out of the Russian city of Perm this weekend that three homeless men have been arrested for knifing a man to death, munching through as much of his body as they could stomach and selling the remainder to a public kiosk serving pies and kebabs.

Given the kind of campaign being waged in the Guardian to discredit the 20th anniversary of the end of communism, it would be no real surprise if the story turned up in the paper’s comment section as the peg for yet another op-ed mourning the passing of the old regimes.

For it has been a truly eye-popping couple of weeks for those who can bear the mental torture of trawling through that paper’s opinion pages.

Take star columnist Seumas Milne who helped build the paper’s appalling Comment is Free website and who ranks as one of its most prominent contributors. Milne is a neo-totalitarian writer with all the usual prejudices: he hates Israel, he thinks Iraq and Afghanistan are about Western imperialism, he regards Obama as a sell-out to Zionists and other agents of the capitalist-corporate conspiracy, he thinks terrorism is mainly the fault of the West for radicalising people who would otherwise be busy building egalitarian socialist democracies, he doesn’t quite call America the Great Satan but he can understand those who do.

You get the picture. Not a man in any mood to celebrate the momentous events which brought down communist dictatorship in central and eastern Europe 20 years ago this month.

For Milne, you see, the “real lesson of Berlin is that nothing is ever settled”.

“From the point of view of western self-esteem,” he noted last week in a spirit of angry sarcasm, “1989 is a year to die for: a tale of the triumph of individual freedom and the defeat of an ideological competitor, all captured live on television in the ritual destruction of a reviled enemy symbol in the heart of Europe. So the blanket coverage of the anniversary of the fall of the wall, and the parade of platitude-mouthing politicians in Berlin to mark the implosion of European communism it symbolised, was only to be expected.”

With a few “platitudes” of his own he manages a bare minimum of grudging and pointedly neutral remarks about “the end of authoritarian rule” but then moves straight on to his core theme about how east Europeans have been let down by the cruel realities of capitalist democracy. How so? Well, he informs, us:

“What the protesters in first Gdansk and then Leipzig were mostly demanding was not capitalism, of course, but a different kind of socialism.”

Oh, really. So that would explain why every single one of the reforming countries set about privatising their socialist economies lock, stock and barrel with the full support of the vast majority of their peoples. Obviously there were (and remain) problems. Privatisation was, in many cases, put into practice by former apparatchiks who in collusion with other remnants of the old regimes, mafia style crime gangs, and opportunists with an eye to a quick buck, did everything they could to line their own pockets.

The social, political and economic mess left by the communists was bound to lead to a deeply painful transition. But watch how slippery Milne is in blaming the pain of that transition not on the communists who made it inevitable but on the capitalists who tried to overcome it.

“…the crisis created under western tutelage and nomenklatura capitalism was comparable to the Great Depression in the US, and national income took more than a decade to recover,” he laments. It’s like blaming a doctor for the post-operative agony of orthodpaedic surgery while absolving the gang of thugs who set about the patient with baseball bats and put him in hospital in the first place.

But this, as they say, is the Guardian World View (GWV) and there have been plenty of others to push the same line.

I referred last week to the eulogy to communist East Germany in the Guardian by one Bruni de la Motte, a former lecturer at East Germany’s Potsdam University who now works as a negotiator for a British trade union.

The end of communism, the reunification of Germany and the transition process generally all brought, she ruefully said, “social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an “elbow society” as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.”

All those unemployed Stasi officers, eh? Truly, what a “disaster”!

And then there was Ulrich Duchrow, a professor of systematic theology, at the University of Heidelberg who was dredged up to tell us that:

“1989 can only be seen as good for humanity in the future if the people of the world learn from the “peaceful revolution” that they have the power of self-liberation from an oppressive and destructive system. If they interpret this year as the victory of the west they allow capitalism to continue to destroy humanity, the earth and eventually itself.” So liberation from communism can only be considered a good thing if it leads to the demise of the ideological, political and economic structures which effected that liberation in the first place. Clever.

We were also offered a piece by Gyula Hegyi, a Hungarian socialist member of the European parliament, who (be grateful for small mercies) cannot bring himself to regret the liberation in its entirety but confidently argues that:

“The ideal answer would be democracy without capitalist dogmas; but this, of course, is not only a Hungarian challenge.”

But which dogmas does he think underpin democracy anyway? Liberal democracy is impossible without capitalist economics, because only via a privatised economy can power be sufficiently dispersed across society to prevent the state from assuming authoritarian control.

In any case, it has been precisely the absence of fully fledged capitalist dogmas in Hungary — the Socialists rejected neo-liberalism as much as Fidesz, their nominally right-leaning but primarily nationalist-collectivist opponents — that has done so much harm to his country’s prospects. It is socialist (read, reformed-communist) government in Hungary of the type supported by Hegyi that has made the country a basket case. Neo-liberal dogmas have been nowhere to be seen.

But the prize for the most tortured and revealing piece of writing on the whole subject goes to the editorial team of the Guardian itself with a piece on November 10 headlined: “The Fall of the Berlin Wall — The Lost Decades”.

If you are in generous mood, you can take at face value comments along the lines that, “Millions regained their basic freedoms, and countries such as Poland that had disappeared altogether under foreign occupation regained their independence.”

But you only have to wait for the very next words in that paragraph to see what is really at work in the Guardian World View and simultaneously to get an insight into a mentality which pervades the European Left and much of Europe with it.

“But,” the editorial continues, “Mr Gorbachev can also rue the day he accepted at face value western promises of a new world order, only to see an old and very familiar one arise in its place. The west was not as good as its word. The Russian leader was promised, but only verbally, that Nato would not expand into the bases left by departing Russian troops in east Germany.”

And, we are later told: “..this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a neutral eastern Europe..”

Let us not dwell on the contemptuous attitude herein displayed towards sovereign democracies in central and eastern Europe who themselves regarded membership of NATO as national priorities in order to secure the precarious democratic freedoms they had just won.

For the key reality to be so much lamented here is that 1989 was in fact a victory for the West, a victory, moreover, which the American-led alliance had the courage and vision to press home. It is the geo-strategic victory itself that the European Left is so vexed by. The shallow and distorted analysis of the shortcomings of the post-communist transition which falsely blames “neo-liberalism” for the region’s ills is beside the point. The Guardian and its ideological fellow travellers never cared much for the people of central and eastern Europe during the Cold War and there is no reason to believe they care for them now.

The fact is that they are not now and never have been truly committed to the liberal-democratic capitalist agenda that forms the core inheritance of the western tradition. They cannot, therefore, have anything other than mixed feelings for an anniversary which, more than any other in living memory, marks the victory of that tradition over the forces of barbarism.

And I conclude this piece with a question that you might like to ponder at length: If you are in the middle ground between liberal-democratic capitalism and totalitarian socialism, where exactly are you on the great issues of our time and how much credence should we really be expected to give to your claim to adhere to basic standards of decency?

For readers who have not yet purchased my recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel please see this extremely generous review. Obviously, I would be grateful if readers would pass this on to anyone they think might be interested and/or post up the link on any relevant websites. To read the review, click here:

http://www.thejc.com/arts/book-reviews/21604/review-a-state-beyond-pale

To purchase the book on Amazon, click here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0297856642/ref=pd_ts_b_16?ie=UTF8&s=books