Shoes left outside Downing Street during the 'Hands Off Gaza: Stop The Bombing: Free Palestine', UK National Demonstration, London, 3 January 2009
This follows a trend began by the Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi (correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi TV station), who threw a shoe at President Bush during a news conference in Baghdad with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on 07 December 2008 (Meyers and Rubin, New York Times, 14 December 2008)
cc cláudia gabriela marques vieira
part of the i heart peace set on flickr
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Last night Channel 4 broadcast Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby, the results of an investigation by Political commentator Peter Oborne into pro-Israel lobbying to Westminster and the media. The programme proved a disturbing document of the non-transparent ways in which pro-Israel lobby groups, primarily the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), flex their 'financial muscle' and 'exercise their influence' over UK foreign policy and news coverage in the Middle East, in the interests of the State of Israel (Oborne, 2009).
Oborne suggests that the CFI alone (which claims 80% of Conservative MPs as its members) has donated more than £10 million to The Conservative Party over the last eight years. So, here's another case of political corruption. So, what's new? Lobbying, of course, is an established part of the UK political scene. As David Cesarani argues in The Guardian's Comment is Free, the same accusations of secrecy and undue influence could readily be applied, say, to Michael Ashcroft, Rupert Murdoch, the arms industry - and the list goes on (17 November 2009). Yet, as Oborne and Jones emphasise in another article for The Guardian's Comment is Free, 'Friends in high places', Oborne's is not a antisemitic conspiracy theory:
It is important to say what we did not find. There is no conspiracy, and nothing resembling a conspiracy (Oborne and Jones, 16 November 2009).
Rather than breaking news necessarily, the documentary highlights exactly how the pro-Israel lobby is able to yield its influence by 'active[ly] defin[ing] the debate in order to limit the options' MPs have over Middle East policy to those that 'would be acceptable' to the interests of the State of Israel (Sir Richard Dalton, Former British Ambassador to Iran 2003-2006, Oborne, 2009).
The documentary focuses in on just how pro-Israel lobbyists manipulate the 'highest level of British politics' (Oborne, 2009). It refers back to William Hague's response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 2006, following the firing of rockets by Hezbollah militants at Israeli border towns as a diversion for an anti-tank missile attack on two armoured Humvees patrolling the Israeli side of the border fence. In a speech in the House of Commons on 20 July 2006, William Hague, then Conservative Shadow Foreign Sectretary, is filmed as saying that, 'elements of the Israeli response are disproportionate' and 'damage the Israeli cause in the long-term'. Oborne claims that Lord Cairns, Treasurer of the Conservative Party, and a leading donor for CFI, was 'outraged and threatened to withdraw funding to the party...no further donations were received by William Hague from CFI board members' (Oborne, 2009).
Yet, Israelis are far more heterogenous in their perspectives to Israeli politics than the more 'right-winged' factions of the pro-Israel lobby would admit. Rabbi David Goldberg (Rabbi Emeritus, Liberal Jewish Synagogue) asserts that pro-Israeli groups such as CFI and the LFI do not represent the views of all British Jews. Goldberg claims that there is an apartheid state in Israel that defies international law on human rights. When asked by Oborne how he thinks the pro-Israeli lobby will react to his 'conversation in this film', Goldberg laughs and says,
They'll say there goes Goldberg, the anti-Zion self-hating Jew again, you know (quoted in Oborne, 2009).
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For me, the part of the investigation focusing on media coverage of Middle East politics is more disconcerting still. Oborne documents the consequences of the axiom pro-Israeli discourses have drawn between the BBC and The Guardian in specific and anti-semitic, partisanism, with regards to Middle East politics. Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, asserts that,
It would be a terribly dangerous thing if the British press were made to feel that they couldn't criticise Israel because they'd be hauled up as anti-semitic...It's a very disreputable argument' (quoted in Oborne, 2009).
Yet, Charlie Beckett, former BBC Editor, now Head of POLIS, a journalism and society think tank, a joint initiative from LSE and The London College of Communication, claims the repercussions of suspected bipartisan media coverage are that the CFI exert 'direct pressure, specially on the BBC'. This has resulted in the censorship of BBC journalists, restrictions on journalists' entry into Israel, the banning of the BBC from Sharon's visit to Downing Street in 2003 and Mark Thompson's controversial decision not to broadcast the DEC Gaza Appeal 2009.
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For an alternative perspective, see Jonathan Hoffman's response to Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby on the CiF Watch website, whose mission is to track anti-semitism on The Guardian's 'Comment is Free': Inside Channel 4’s Conspiracy Factory
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Today I tweeted the following on @Futurepresent:
@conservatives @DowningStreet @BBC_HaveYourSay How do you plead to Oborne's allegations in 'Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby'?
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And suddenly, I'm being followed by @HomelandSecNews. In the rare event that there'll be any form of response to my audaciousness, I'll post it here.
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