Journalism & Journalists in John Simpson's book 'Unreliable Sources'

One of the books I dip into from time to time is John Simpson's book 'Unreliable Sources'. Anyone who is amazed at how seemingly the whole corpus of journalists slants the news and reports unsubstantiated and mostly lying arab propaganda about Israel would do well to read this book. In nigh on 600 pages.

John Simpson doesn't mention the arab-Israel conflict once. He doesn't seem to be aware of 'Pallywood' or of how his fellow journalists have suspended journalistic skepticism to swallow whole propaganda such as the blood libel of Mohammed Dura supposedly killed by Israelis. And the journalists who went to a press conference in Gaza supposedly being held by candle light through lack of electricity owing to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Of course the room had been blacked out as the chinks of light coming through the curtains  showed. The journalists present failed to mention that fact in their reports in the press and on television.

Maybe John Simpson does not wish to invite the opprobrium that would be heaped upon him were he to write about his colleagues shameful prostitution of their profession in the cause of the so-called palestinians, but his book is the weaker because of it.

Simpson goes into detail about how British journalists have been turning a blind eye to facts which don't fit in with their world view or with British policy ever since the Boer War over a hundred years ago.

"There are plenty of villains.... journalists who through laziness or conceit or ideological tunnel vision chose not to find out what was really going on. There is Bennet Burleigh of the Daily Telegraph who, without actually bothering to go and check out the facts, assured the nation that there was no truth in the stories that Boer woman and children were dying like flies in the British concentration camps in south Africa."

And then there were the anti-semitic press barons such as the pro nazi Lord Rothermere publisher of the Daily Mail who wrote to Hitler congratulating him on annexing  Czechoslovakia in 1939. Lord Beaverbrook who basked in the society of nazi ambassador  Ribbentrop and who in December 1938 when the pre-war nazi persecution of jews in Germany was at its height said incorrectly,

"The jews have got a big position in the press here. I estimate that one third of the circulation of the Daily Telegraph is Jewish. The Daily Mirror may be owned by Jews. The Daily Herald is owned by jews. And the News Chronicle should really be the Jews Chronicle. Not because of ownership but because of sympathy."

 The anti-semitic British press of yesteryear has mutated into an anti-Israel press of today although not even concealing the hatred of jews if they can be described as 'settlers'. Anti-semitism updates itself for a new age. Herzl's comment that antisemitism is a virus has never been more true as we see with nazi style boycotts against the jewish state, often organized by jews indoctrinated into hatred of their own people and Israel by western media, and a total ignorance of Israel and its history.

Interesting also is how the British establishment by way of  'heavy breathing' i.e. bringing political pressure to bear on the BBC and press, rather than actually censoring reports, managed to keep many unwanted facts about the nazis and their barbarism out of the news in pre-WWII Britain.

This pressure kept Winston Churchill  out of the BBC and even had his column in Beaverbrook's Evening Standard taken away from him.

So let's not be surprised when the British media, the BBC the Guardian, the Independent distort news about Israel. They are only carrying on a great British tradition learned long ago in South Africa and when appeasing the nazis.