Academics and Israel: a new ‘trahison des clercs’?
by David Herman, The Article:
It is hard to say who has let themselves (and us) down most since the barbaric attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October. Of course, both BBC News and Sky News have had a catastrophic time. Their coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas has been full of distortions, bias and omissions. It is hard to imagine how their reputations will recover from this. They have certainly lost the confidence of many in the Jewish community.
Danny Cohen, the BBC’s former director of television, accused the BBC of being “institutionally antisemitic” and said that the BBC’s inaccurate reporting on Israel “risks adding fuel to the fire” of Jew hate in Britain. “I think there’s institutional bias at play,” he added. “That’s why it keeps happening. Mistakes happen once, perhaps twice, but when they keep happening you have to ask why. I think there are institutional biases.” Cohen added: “What’s clear to me is there is an ongoing issue with anti-Israel bias that there appears to be an inability to control.”
I have written several pieces for TheArticle documenting some of the worst examples of our mainstream news coverage, giving specific examples, such as the BBC’s disastrous coverage of the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. David Collier has written on social media about the anti-Israel bias of numerous hospital doctors in Gaza that has been overlooked by TV News. Meanwhile @CAMERAorgUK has exposed numerous examples of bias and distortion day by day.
But perhaps the most disturbing form of bias has come from academics in Britain and America. Some are longtime critics of Israel, for example Professor Ilan Pappé, Professor of History, Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, who was introduced by one TV presenter as “an Israeli writer and historian” when he should have been introduced as an anti-Israel polemicist. When his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, was translated into Hebrew, the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz commented that his work “suffers from negligence, manipulations and mistakes galore, and the result is not serious research.” His interview was entirely predictable.
Read also: Holocaust Historians, the Genocide Charge, and Gaza. The accusation is wrong on the facts and objectively serves to support the intent of Hamas to murder Jews with impunity by Norman J.W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf, Quillette
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