Two weeks ago CiF Watch exposed the anti-Israel bias of a certain “BellaM”, a Guardian moderator.

“BellaM” made quite a name for herself with this unbelievably idiotic comment engaging in an ad hominem attack on Melanie Phillips in her capacity as a Guardian staff member.

BellaM

31 Oct 09, 9:53am

Staff Staff

I imagine she’s like that character in Little Britain who is violently sick every time she hears the words ‘black or gay.’ Except for Melanie, the word would be ‘Muslim.’

Her comment spurred post after post of mouth-frothing denunciation of Melanie Phillips in the now infamous Ed Husain thread that we reported on in our post Two Minutes Hate: Melanie Phillips bashing on the Ed Husain thread.

After posting our expose of BellaM this is what she tweeted:

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Catch that? Instead of being thoroughly ashamed of herself, she views being exposed on CiF Watch as a biased anti-Israel moderator as some sort of badge of honor.

Anyway it gets better.  The Jewish Chronicle is now reporting that the “intervention of one of the Guardian’s supposedly independent moderators, the anonymous BellaM” further complicated the row between Phillips and Husain. According to the JC:

Though she has not been disciplined, the Guardian has reminded BellaM of the paper’s guidelines that staff posting on the site “should uphold a high standard of civility and avoid any behaviour that might bring the Guardian’s good name into disrepute”.

Wow. So who is BellaM?

Well suspecting in yesterday’s post covering the antisemitic moderation on the Steve Bell cartoon thread that BellaM may have had a hand in clicking the delete button a few too many times when pro-Israel posters legitimately pointed out the double standards of analogizing Israel’s security barrier with the Berlin Wall, we exposed who BellaM really is – a certain Bella Mackie.

It doesn’t end there though. It turns out that there is someone called Isabella Mackie that works for the Guardian and that Mackie is the maiden name of the wife of none other than Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger. According to the blog you gotta smile, Private Eye reported:

[i]n the future, parliamentary offspring would do well to follow the example of recent graduate Isabella Mackie, who had the grace to use her mother’s surname when taking a job on the Guardian’s website to disguise the act that she is the daughter of the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger.’

How embarrassing for Rusbridger and he probably had to step in to prevent her from being sacked – don’t you just love the nepotism!

So since we’ve got Daddy Rusbridger’s attention with this post (no doubt Bella will be running to Daddy for help), I’d like to ask him a few questions:

1. Why does the Guardian have an obsessive focus on the Israel/Palestine conflict that is quite out of proportion with any other conflict in the world? And why are the overwhelming majority of articles on the Israel/Palestinian conflict anti-Israel in their bias.

2. Why is your newspaper constantly delegitimizing, demonizing and subjecting Israel to double standards through articles and editorials by contributors that harbor openly antismetic views including by a fringe group of self-hating house Jews?

3. Why do you not ban posters that have a track record of making antisemitic comments? This website is replete with examples. Recently we wrote a post calling for a certain poster called IllegalCombatAnt to be banned for, among other things, engaging in Holocaust denial (which by the way took 16 hours to be deleted by your moderators – maybe Bella was on duty then). IllegalCombatAnt still has posting rights as do the numerous other antisemitic posters documented on this site.

4. Why do you instead ban pro-Israel posters? In particular why was AKUS and Cityca banned? Read their eminently sensible articles and posts and tell me what could have possibly warranted their banning other than the fact that they chose to tell the truth about Israel, something the Guardian is incapable of doing.  And on the subject of silencing dissent, why was Robin Shepherd denied a right of reply after he was defamed by house Jew Antony Lerman?

5. Why does the Guardian consistently delete comments by pro-Israel commenters? Again this website is replete with examples so don’t even bother denying this. Besides your own daughter has already tried denying that one and failed miserably.

6. By the same token why are antisemitic comments consistently not deleted by your moderators. Again spend a few minutes on this site and you’ll see what I mean. The evidence we have accumulated in the space of under three months is simply breathtaking and no doubt will serve in the future  for reports and studies into antisemitism in the United Kingdom. And speaking of reports why did you ignore the 2008 report on Antisemitism on Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ by Jonathan Hoffman? This report was submitted to the UK Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism, an indictment in and of itself. Is this the kind of reputation you want for the Guardian? And while I’m at it let me remind you of the hollow and meaningless words of Matt Seaton to the  Jewish Chronicle last year“[w]e have a zero-tolerance policy on antisemitic postings or any other form of hate speech.” Oh really.

7. Have you ever asked yourself what makes the Guardian such a fertile ground for attracting antisemitic views? Did you try taking our recent poll where posts from the neo-Nazi website Stormfront were largely indistinguishable from the comments posted regularly on the Guardian/CiF Israel/Palestine threads? And did you know the Guardian’s very own cartoonist, Steve Bell, may actually follow Stormfront threads. Here’s what the estimable Yaacov Lozowick, former director of archives at Yad Vashem, had to say on the subject:

[CiF Watch] seem to be demonstrating how the Jew haters of the Left and the Jew haters of the Right are coalescing in the way they see the world. They don’t need to copy from each other, if their processes of cognition have converged. It is that convergence which is significant.

8. And tell me what on earth is your commissioning editor of “Comment is Free”, Brian Whitaker, doing insinuating that pro-Israel posters are paid agents of the Israel government fanning the flames of Jewish conspiracy theory? And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Brian Whitaker making a fool of himself. In fact here is what I wrote in the last hyperlinked post to Brian Whitaker:

Now Brian if you really want to defend the charge that the Guardian promotes antisemitic discourse both above the line and below the line you are more than welcome to defend the indefensible.

Here’s an offer. Why don’t you write an article for us explaining why you think this is not case? I’ll publish whatever you write. In particular, our readers would be intrigued to know the following: Why do you feature a disproportionate number of writers deeply hostile to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state many of whom are self-hating Jews and have a track record of antisemitism? Why do you tolerate antisemitism in the comment threads? Why for example have the numerous antisemitic commenters that populate CiF not been permanently banned – it’s not as if you are oblivious to this? Why do you delete comments putting forward a pro-Israel position? Why did you ban AKUS, Cityca and others? And why do you insinuate that pro-Israel posters are paid agents of the Israeli government?

You can email me at contactus@cifwatch.com with your submission. I’m standing by.

Brian never submitted anything and the silence is deafening.

9.  And while we’re at it, why didn’t Elisabeth Ribbans, managing editor of the Guardian, respond to Dennis MacEoin’s critique of Guardian editorial anti-Israel bias. Did he not deserve a response either?

10. What do you think the other board members of the Guardian Media Group and the Scott Trust will say when they discover the depth of antisemitism on the pages of the Guardian? I find it hard to believe that they would just shrug their shoulders particularly those that are independent members of the board.

11. And what do you think your advertisers will say when they too discover that many a guardianista harbors deeply antisemitic views?  Just take a look at this Tomasky thread and you’ll see what I mean (I note that HSBC Bank advertised on that thread).

12. Last but not least do you not think that CiF Watch readers and more generally the Jewish community is owed an explanation as to what steps you intend to take to clean up your act or will you continue to stick your head in the sand just like Georgina Henry, Matt Seaton and Brian Whitaker do.

Alan the Guardian is losing money hand over fist and the ship is sinking. The question is are you going to clean house before its too late?