Defending Dispatches
November 22nd, 2009 § 8 Comments
Last week Channel 4 aired the excellent documentary Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby in which Peter Oborne investigated the distorting influence of Zionist interests on British politics. Predictably, the attacks were not long in coming and they took the usual vituperative form. Prominently, they included one by Israel’s leading lobbyist in the UK parliament Denis McShane. Here the film makers Oborne and James Jones respond to McShane’s smears. (Also, don’t miss John Pilger’s account of his own encounter with the Lobby after he produced Palestine is Still the Issue, another critical film about Israel).
Antisemitism is the most notorious form of racism. Its long and hideous history culminated in the Nazi Holocaust and its still exists as a powerful and very dangerous force in the 21st century. The lesson of the past is that it must be fought wherever it manifests itself.
For this very reason, it is essential that the term should not be abused. Sadly, the Labour MP Denis MacShane has done so in his attack on our Channel 4 Dispatches programme, ‘Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby’, broadcast on Monday evening.
MacShane shockingly says that our film is “1930s style prejudice dressed up as modern TV journalism”. He even more shockingly concludes that “antisemitic politics is back”. The charge that we have somehow made common cause with Nazis could not be more damaging, or more false.
The pro-Israel lobby is a legitimate subject of investigation, just like any other lobby, and we carried out a scrupulous investigation. MacShane refuses to engage with any of the points raised about the need for transparency and accountability.
We showed in our film how some defenders of Israel deliberately exploit the charge of antisemitism as a way of discrediting legitimate criticism of Israeli foreign policy – a tactic which debases and cheapens a very real and dangerous phenomenon. Denis MacShane has fallen into that trap.
Oborn fingered MacShane in his 2005 book,The Rise of Political Lying.
So the two have form so to speak.
Along with Mandelson and Straw who were shown to be at the heart of the New Labour programme of deceit and disinformation which involved lying and manipulating Parliament and the media whenever it was deemed by them politically necessary so to do,MacShane figured prominently in Oborn’s account.
MacShane,as Minister for Europe,distributed Euros among his Rotherham constituents and blamed Britain’s dogged wish to keep the pound for the loss of jobs in the steel industry!He infamously told the Scotsman that Gordon Brown’s five economic tests for joining the Euro were a “red herring”,then denied this breach of party loyalty by pretending he’d never said it in the first place!This even after the paper confronted him with the taped evidence that he had indeed gainsaid his “political masters”.
We have an idea who MacShane’s real political masters are and they explain why he can afford to be so blase about flouting the then Chancellor’s authority.
Though Oborn naturally never refers to the Jewish ancestry of Mandelson,Straw or MacShane-or even dares mention the Rothschild puppeteers who pull their strings-he will,especially after the Dispatches Lobby programme,inevitably become a target for the Lobby “antisemitism” hue and cry hatchet mob.
Moreover the days of the Mail must surely be numbered with the financier oligarchy desperate to get their hands on it as they did with the Times at the beginning of the last century…
The Mail reported Saturday that MacShane in his role as Head of “The National Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism” has recently been exercised over Easy Jet’s in-flight magazine which promoted Berlin as a destination by picturing models cavorting over the Holocaust Rememberance Field in the city.Naturally MacShane decried Easy Jet’s trivialization of the Holocaust and won an abject apology.
Easy Jet clearly knows just how litigious the Lobby can be!
Oborn and the Mail please note:your days may be numbered!
In future expect features in the Mail like this one from the Times which shows that British Israelism is alive and well at the heart of the establishment.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6677414.ece
After reading Pilger’s piece I came across this Tim Llewellyn article on the distorted framing of the second intifada which is also well worth checking out.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jun/20/israel.broadcasting
Hey sorry to post this here. Look at BBC’s today’s story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8373506.stm
It contains a line similar to other “balanced” views of BBC stories :(
“That would involve Israel releasing several hundred jailed Palestinians, including some who are serving time for murder – and the Islamist Hamas movement releasing Sgt Shalit.”
Readers might be interested to know that UN Watch is a front group for the American Jewish Committee, which is the foreign policy wing of the Israel Lobby
Thanks 99.
Its rightwing ridiculous rubbish with not a whit of credibility, easily and completely dismissible for the fact that its completely untrue and demonstrably so. Its blatant but that shows you the ugly naked propaganda/ hasbara the Goldstone report (which doesn’t go far enough but is nevertheless a landmark) faces, and worse.
Somebody come pick me up off the floor.
Whatever damage it might or might not be able to do, I’m just reeling from the evidence all that could come out of anyone’s mouth!
And, yes, the Goldstone Report is entirely too little and too bent in its reasoning for anyone insisting on SENSE to want to back, and yet we are FORCED to back it anyway for some minute illusion of progress in a battle for decency that shouldn’t have lasted over sixty seconds, let alone sixty YEARS.
I have to go screaming naked off a cliff now.
Maybe, if one can stand the over-the-top “background” music here, it would be helpful to juxtapose the UN Watch video with this one:
… just to be clear….