Media and Israel: Friday night long reads

1) Over at the Fathom journal is a transcript of a speech titled ‘The ideological roots of media bias against Israel’ given by journalist Matti Friedman at a recent BICOM dinner.candles

“As one BBC reporter informed a Jewish interviewee on camera several weeks ago, after a Muslim terrorist murdered four Jewish shoppers at a Paris supermarket, “Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well.” Everything, that is, can be linked to the occupation, and Jews can be blamed even for the attacks against them. This isn’t the voice of the perpetrators, but of the enablers. The voice of the enablers is less honest than that of the perpetrators, and more dangerous for being disguised in respectable English. This voice is confident and growing in volume.”

Read the whole thing here

2) Hebrew speakers can find an article written by Yiftach Curiel in which he discusses the British media’s “obsession with Israel” here.

“After more than a year and a half in the role of spokesman for the embassy in London, I am still more surprised not by negative or inaccurate coverage […] but mainly by the volume of coverage and the unexplained level of interest in what happens in our little corner in the Middle East: in the great hopes hung upon us (such as an end to the conflict between extreme Islam and the West if only we would end the dispute between us and the Palestinians) and in the disappointment when we do not conduct ourselves like Sweden or Finland in the face of challenges which European states themselves have not experienced for tens of years.”

3) Anyone still in need of an antidote to the crass Tweet sent by the BBC’s ‘The Big Questions’ to promote its Holocaust Memorial Day edition can find an exceptionally moving piece by British journalist Hugo Rifkind here.

 

 

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