H/T Margie
We commented earlier on Greg Philo’s warning (Israel’s PR victory shames newscasters, May 31) of the injurious effects of Zionist hasbara, but the Guardian comment moderation process, as always, produced some curious deletions.
Here’s a comment merely noting what we’ve documented, that the “Jews/Zionists have undue influence on the media” is common and uncontroversial narrative at CiF/The Guardian:
And, then.
Here’s a comment accurately referring to violent tactics employed by Hamas during their coup against Fatah in 2007:
And then.
A comment accurately noting that Philo is part of a political community which includes folks who find Holocaust Memorial Day objectionable.
And, then.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
33 comments
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May 31, 2011 at 6:06 pm
pretzelberg
extimesreader was responding to the poster ireadnews, who claimed – on the anecdotal evidence (ahem) of a “Jewish friend” – that Jewish tourists to Israel are pressganged into serving in the IDF! That’s right: once you touch down at Ben-Gurion, you’re in the army.
May 31, 2011 at 6:31 pm
Thank God I'm An Infidel
“All the news and commentary we consider COUNTER REVOLUTIONARY we delete”.
Don’t confuse Der Guardian with facts.
If the facts are not to Der Guardians liking, they ignore or delete.
Why don’t people BOYCOTT Der Guardian and its paying advertisers????
It’s time to slap Der Guardian with charges of promoting hate.
June 1, 2011 at 1:00 am
Hushedsilence
Thank you for reproducing my comment which was obviously too rich or too honest for the moderators’ blood.
I wonder what FAQ house-rules the moderators would quote to explain their deletion of another of my comments in that thread
HushedSilence
31 May 2011 5:59PM
There are only about seventeen million Jews in the world and it is well-known that they run the media, Hollywood, the banks, world finance and now we learn that they run the BBC too. They must be superbeings.
June 1, 2011 at 1:44 am
benorr
Strange how they put these articles at the times that they do,and for the short periods of time that these articles are then left on.
These anti-Israeli articles are coming fast and furious,a sick obsession with Israel,the more that Israel advances and progresses the more it irritates these people at the Guardian…..
Just complaining here on CiF Watch isn’t cutting it,a lot more needs to be done to counter these people.The Guardian has become the PR machine for Hamas,are they getting paid for this?????….Very well I suppose…..
Most of the good pro-Israeli posters have left CiF,and don’t post there anymore.Leaving the CiF field to these people is not the answer.
June 1, 2011 at 3:38 am
Danny
Yeah whereas in Syria there is no pressure:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110526/wl_nm/us_witness_syria_torture
June 1, 2011 at 4:00 am
Ben
I used to bother to post on CIF…. but after having many many comments defending israel deleted i felt like King Kanute and stopped… went back yesterday and was shocked how bad it has become.. it used to be bad but now its just plain disgusting…… can do something other than moan and bitch about it…… action needs to be taken.
June 1, 2011 at 4:09 am
Ben
G.Philo@socsci.gla.ac.uk – Greg Philo’s email
June 1, 2011 at 6:46 am
Yohoho
Have you sent the prof a copy of this article?
I think someone should.
June 1, 2011 at 4:51 am
MindTheCrap
A brilliant article by Friedman in the NYTimes (I would love to see him comment on the Philo article):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01friedman.html?src=recg
June 1, 2011 at 9:26 am
peterthehungarian
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Bin Laden both win: In the short run, Bibi gets to keep the West Bank, with 300,000 Jews occupying 2.4 million Palestinians. And in the long run, Bin Laden helps to destroy Israel as a Jewish democracy.
Friedman demonstrates again and again that apart from empty and totally off the reality slogans can’t write anything. There are certain readers who consider this kind of BS brilliant. This is natural, millions eat the end of the world crap too…
June 1, 2011 at 5:31 am
Philo-not
MindTheCRap, I have difficulty believing anything by Friedman to be brilliant.
Hushed, isn’t it ironic that the political-censorship-loving hypocrites at the Guardian hushed Hushed?
Ben and Benor are right — the global Jewish community needs to declare openly that the G is an anti-Semitic institution which both the Jewish community and any advertisers of conscience should boycott.
Hushed, one detail – the worldwide Jewish population is only about 13 million.
June 1, 2011 at 5:56 am
HairShirt
Philo-not, I agree with you. As I see it, CiF Watch was formed to broadcast the Guardian’s Jew-hatred cloaked by antiZionism and is doing a very good job at that. However, it has to be a process, like dripping water on a stone, for it to percolate through to all sections of the Jewish community here and abroad.
They and we are up against it though with an entity which is so far gone and so convinced of its own rectitude, and so defended against even reasoned criticism of its biases that it refuses to change course.
The answer has to be, therefore, to undermine it as much as we can by different means, within the law, until the Guardian edifice crumbles.
And as for the deletions and disappearances of criticism from Philo’s thread, isn’t that common CiF procedure in respect of dissenting views? They are so stupid that they don’t realise that the sheer weight and volume of deletions would ring alarm bells in the mind of the intelligent passer-by, in terms of “What are they trying to hide?”
MindtheCrap, I looked at the article and one sentence leapt off the page at me :
“..Absent some amazing Palestinian peace overture, and maybe even with one, I do not see any Israeli leader with enough authority today to pull Israel out of the West Bank….” My emphasis would be on “amazing” (and it would be given the current craziness which obtains within the PA and in Gaza) and only a fool would make still more concessions to the PA in the face of the stupidity emanating from there at the moment not to mention their shaky alliance with Hamas.
Apart from that, I also agree with Philo-not about Friedman and the article is not “brilliant” MindtheCrap just because you happen to agree with it.
June 1, 2011 at 7:05 am
Groovy Times
I think agitating against Der Guardian through an organised boycott and divestment movement is a good idea. An orchestrated campaign led by prominent Jews, intellectuals and like-minded defenders of racial tolerance could expose the institutionalised bigotry that is the driving force behind the worst excesses in Cif to a wider audience.
Examples of this malice and hate against the Jewish collective – so well documented and archived here – should be used in adverts taken out in rival papers both at home and abroad.
And why not a legal challenge that at the very least will make Rusbridger defend his position in an objective forum to answer accusations that he is little more than a hate-monger who – when it comes to the Jews – has more in common with Holocaust denying exterminationist anti-Semites than with western liberal principles of freedom and human rights. He should be made to feel uncomfortable, and should be unwelcome in countries like the USA, where the use of anti-Semitic tropes and libels are unacceptable in public discourse.
June 1, 2011 at 7:25 am
Serendipity
I agree about the legal challenge to Rusbridger who has in the past apologised for the antisemitism in the Guardian (albeit reluctantly) which goes to his knowledge that it is there.
The difficulties are that apart from commissioning articles from members of proscribed terrorist organisations said and other articles stop just short of antisemitism and incitement to violence. It’s very difficult for the police or others to bring a case against people like the infamous Bapthorpe who CiF allowed to say that the West Bank settlers should be shot if they did not leave voluntarily.
The threats to social cohesion are, however, palpable and a case could be tested.
Any lawyers looking in? What do you think?
June 1, 2011 at 8:16 am
Serendipity
@greg philo
“I’ve spoken at hundreds of meetings, one I recall was with agroup of lawyers who wanted to sue the BBC for being biased against Israel and as for being part of a ‘political community that wants ….’ such junk really doesn’t deserve an answer….”
Why not? Even you must be aware that Israel and Jew-hatred are too readily conflated within the public discourse, (indeed by peddling what you did on CiF you gave the opportunity to bed those in further) aided and abetted by the Guardian and anti-Israel rather than pro-Palestinian research such as yours.
“I wouldn’t have deleted the comments but I don’t run the Guardian. I did put his up as a response to some of the discussion which did appear:
Our argument is about balance and that both sides should be heard equally”
Oh come off it! We have heard and seen your performances at SOAS and at the BDS conference! How on earth can intelligent people construe these as supporting “.. both sides should be heard equally…”?
“It is not hard to summarise the main elements of each side’s argument about the reasons for conflict. The Israelis say that it continues because they are fighting a war on terror, that their opponents are against western democracy and in addition are anti-semitic. They are not interested in peace but only in destroying Israel which is under attack initially from suicide bombs and now from rockets, which force Israel to respond.”
So far so good, but from your SOAS performance (elsewhere on this blog on YouTube) the casual passer by would have got no inkling that you knew that you knew anything about this. (I do accept that you would have been booed off the stage had you said such things at SOAS, all of which begs the question, as I have ).
“The Palestinians would say that they were forced from their homes and land when Israel was created, then Israel took over the lands to which they had fled, and now they live under a brutal military rule, a kind of apartheid,in which thousands of their people are killed, kidnapped and imprisoned without trial. Israel is therefore a terrorist state and they are trying as a people to throw off this oppressor.”
I note that not once do you mention in this segment that the Palestinians want peace with Israel or your understanding, if you have any, of why they do not! That is a highly interesting omission. You don’t indicate either that you have any understanding of the Islamist mindset which plays ducks and drakes with the reality of any Palestinians who might want peace with Israel rather than fighting war after war which they are fated to lose. The Hamas Charter is a thoroughly nasty document which sets out the game plan of Hamas and now Fatah thereby giving an excellent insight into the tendency towards what has come to be called the “autorhinectomy” attitude of Islamist leaders. They are willing to fight to the last drop of their people’s blood (not theirs, they hide under hospitals in safety or flee to other Arab countries) rather than make a peace which will be a compromise and give land to both peoples. Netanyahu was spot on when he said that the problem is not that the Palestinians don’t have their state, but that the Jews do. While that attitude persists, then it is difficult to envisage a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“Now which of these two do you think appears most on television news? If you are in any doubt, do your own study and count the references as we have. Journalists tell us that they have a lot of problems if they reference the second perspective. Are we not supposed to report this in our results?..”
Stringers for newspapers and all the MSM “reference the second perspective” by mixing truth and lies about it, mainly because they are misled by the Hamas/Fatah minders assigned to them. Are you arguing that they believe that what they are told is the truth? There is also the difficulty set out in Stephanie Guttman’s “The Other War” where reporters are seldom sent out to get the news first-hand and therefore by the time it hits the page or TV screen it is a mass of thoughts as facts and cumulative error, if not outright lies as was proven in the case of Muhammad al-Durah.
Your results are simply not nuanced enough to take on board the fact that the BBC, for example, more often than not fails to report the context of eg Israeli action against Islamist terrorists in Gaza and the Guardian certainly has a virulently anti-Israel spin which descends below the line very rapidly into Jew-hatred in terms of the EUMC definition.
“There are two big issues which flow from this. The first is that it is not possible to have sensible proposals for peace unless the arguments of both sides are part of the public and political discussion. The second is how does the BBC explain the absences in its own coverage, to the point where its journalists are contacting us to complain, and how can it defend its refusal even to cover the results of a study such as this? There must be a public debate about the quality of coverage and the BBC really has to deal with its own responsibilities in facilitating this.”
Dealing with your first above, once more you will agree that your own performances at SOAS and the BDS conference and your association with anti-Israel (rather than pro-Palestinian) organisations make a nonsense that you believe that both sides must be heard. What precisely have you done to make sure that they are in the light of what I have just written?
As to your second point, CiF Watch has referred to the Guardian and the BBC as being cheeks of the same arse as regards their anti-Israel bias. How many people contact you about the omissions and distortions about Israel in the Guardian, and, again, what precisely have you answered or done to set the record straight and to allow “both sides to be heard” as you say in your post?
June 1, 2011 at 7:16 am
Mitnaged
Philo’s tendentious arguments remind me of the bleating of the late unlamented IJV that they were being stifled by, of all things, the Board of Deputies!!!
I can’t help but wonder about the depths of a psyche which can conjure up such demons. I suspect that Philo is miffed because people took issue with the flawed methodology of his research and he took it one crazy stage further by finding a specious involvement of da Jooz in undermining it. It must’ve been difficult to admit even to himself that the methodology was flawed and therefore his study was.
He feels persecuted because he has been publicly shamed by some of the reviews he got (the good reviews come from pro-Palestinian organisations or students) and even had to wheel in some professor from the same flaky outfit to rebut those poor reviews and stand up for him. I read that the Glasgow Media Group’s approach has been questioned before, but that they cleaned up their act subsequently. From Philo’s “contributions” that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Out of paranoid persecution comes projection of course. Philo and his crew of distorters felt gagged and therefore have gone all out to gag their critics.
I wrote elsewhere that I wondered whether Philo was getting funds from Islamic sources to peddle not pro-Palestinian propaganda but nasty anti-Israel. I am beginning to change my mind. This person wants to get his own back at the Jews who dared to criticise his flawed research and his way of doing so is to lend support to anti-Israel, pro-BDS organisations.
June 1, 2011 at 7:17 am
greg Philo
I’ve spoken at hundreds of meetings, one I recall was with agroup of lawyers who wanted to sue the BBC for being biased against Israel and as for being part of a ‘political community that wants ….’ such junk really doesn’t deserve an answer. I wouldn’t have deleted the comments but I don’t run the Guardian. I did put his up as a response to some of the discussion which did appear:
Our argument is about balance and that both sides should be heard equally. It is not hard to summarise the main elements of each side’s argument about the reasons for conflict. The Israelis say that it continues because they are fighting a war on terror, that their opponents are against western democracy and in addition are anti-semitic. They are not interested in peace but only in destroying Israel which is under attack initially from suicide bombs and now from rockets, which force Israel to respond.
The Palestinians would say that they were forced from their homes and land when Israel was created, then Israel took over the lands to which they had fled, and now they live under a brutal military rule, a kind of apartheid,in which thousands of their people are killed, kidnapped and imprisoned without trial. Israel is therefore a terrorist state and they are trying as a people to throw off this oppressor.
Now which of these two do you think appears most on television news? If you are in any doubt, do your own study and count the references as we have. Journalists tell us that they have a lot of problems if they reference the second perspective. Are we not supposed to report this in our results?
There are two big issues which flow from this. The first is that it is not possible to have sensible proposals for peace unless the arguments of both sides are part of the public and political discussion. The second is how does the BBC explain the absences in its own coverage, to the point where its journalists are contacting us to complain, and how can it defend its refusal even to cover the results of a study such as this? There must be a public debate about the quality of coverage and the BBC really has to deal with its own responsibilities in facilitating this.
June 1, 2011 at 9:09 am
MindTheCrap
Philo -
The sad part of your article is that you (an academic) seem unable to grasp how fundamentally subjective your “research” is. Your judgement of the public’s grasp of the news is based on YOUR SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION of the news, which is biased in favour of the Palestinians. You then fail to differentiate between two situations – the person is not aware of the actual events (as you claim), or the alternative, that he simply disagrees with your interpretation. But what it really lacking is a “control” survey, i.e. you asked people about what I will term “pro-Israeli fallacies” but you neglected to ask them about “pro-Palestinian fallacies”. I bet that you would have discovered that the same people were equally ignorant of the “truth”; would that have proved that the “Palestinians have an undue influence on the media” ?? You could also have tested the public on the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Russian occupation of Chechnya, etc. No doubt you would have exposed the undue influence of the Turks/Chinese/Russians on the British media.
I suspect that you simply don’t believe that there is a “pro-Palestinian fallacy”, i.e. the Palestinian version of events is by definition and without doubt the “true version”. You are entitled to your personal opinion, but an academic is supposed to draw conclusions from the results of an objective investigation, not tailor the investigation to fit the a predetermined conclusion.
June 1, 2011 at 11:08 am
SarahLeah
Agreed, mindthecrap. Philo, like so many of the company he keeps “academic” and otherwise isn’t even aware that he may be biased. His performance at SOAS was OTT theatre, designed to feed the Israel-hating/Jew-hating beasts in the audience what they needed.
Greg Philo, if you are still around, could you post a transcript of that speech here? Note that I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, that maybe the YouTube video was edited to show you in the worst possible light (and it did!).
Now’s your chance to set the record straight, if the YouTube video is itself biased.
June 1, 2011 at 11:02 am
SarahLeah
Well Greg
Now is your chance to put your money where you say your mouth is:
http://justjournalism.com/media-analysis/groundwork-being-laid-for-anti-israel-flotilla-narrative/
Write an article for the main stream press about the narrative described about the new flotilla, being careful to put BOTH sides of the argument
And see how many will agree to publish it.
June 1, 2011 at 7:49 am
Adam Levick
Greg:
We Israelis don’t “say” we’re fighting a war against “terror”, we “are” fighting against state and non-state actors (Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, etc.) who state both in English and Arabic that they seek nothing less than the complete annihilation of our nation, and engage in quite explicit anti-Semitism, often in their very founding charters, which include calls to murder Jews. Just to clarify, are you contending that these facts are debatable?
As far as the broader point of the UK media being biased in favor of Israel, please understand how unserious such a charge is for those of us who read the Guardian every day. The pro-Palestinian bias there is beyond egregious – it’s institutional, and is something we document here daily.
As far as the BBC, I’d highly recommend reading reports by Trevor Asserson which continue to make a very strong case that the opposite of your assertion is the fact. You can find them here.
http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/
But, beyond the statistics, I’d strongly suggest that you’d be taken more seriously if you didn’t suggest that Israel’s efforts to engage in PR is something unique, or pernicious. All gov’ts engage in hasbara, as do all institutions. Your post at CiF characterized efforts by Israel, and her supporters, to defend Israeli in the media as something dark and injurious to the pubic debate.
More broadly, I honestly don’t understand how you can wake up in the morning believing that there is a dearth of criticism against Israel in the world. Its this meta argument you make which I find baffling.
Finally, here’s Tim Llewellyn, your co-panelist at the MEMO event (a story in itself) on the subject of veteran White House Arab-Israeli peace negotiator Denis Ross: “What a lovely Anglo-Saxon name! But Denis Ross is not just a Jew, he is a Zionist, a long-time Zionist… and now directs an Israeli-funded think tank in Washington. He is a Zionist propagandist.”
Let me humbly suggest that those who argue that the Palestinians aren’t being covered fairly in the media may be taken more seriously if they at least refrain from engaging in such explicitly anti-Semitic narratives.
June 1, 2011 at 11:21 am
Mitnaged
Adam, your segment above is proof positive, if any were needed, of the marriage in the minds of the ignorant of antiZionism and antisemitism. Like the screaming Arab crowds these ignoramuses don’t care to distinguish between hatng Jews or Zionists or Israelis.
And as for “..More broadly, I honestly don’t understand how you can wake up in the morning believing that there is a dearth of criticism against Israel in the world. Its this meta argument you make which I find baffling….”
The answer’s simple. These are first-order symptoms of anti-Israel Derangement Syndrome, characterised by delusions, paranoid ideation or both, and the lack of reflexivity or insight into how their behaviour might be perceived.
It’s as if the cognitive dots are all there but they are not joined up. Look how many times Philo has contradicted himself above, apparently without realising it!
June 1, 2011 at 8:18 am
Ben
Question for Greg: Who is paying you to “research” and spout such lies or are you peddling such inaccurate hate-filled nonsense out of genuine israel/jew hatred (delete as appropriate)??? be honest with us and yourself
June 1, 2011 at 8:25 am
censorship is free
Now which of these two do you think appears most on television news? –
The latter,without a shred of doubt.
You no doubt also think that the guardian is pro – Israel.
June 1, 2011 at 12:13 pm
jane schlitz
Philo…..All governments engage in spin and PR, all news is in the moment, and all reasonable people question the news recognizing there is always a bias, why should anyone believe the “Palestinian narrative” over the the “Israeli narrative”?
Without naming and documenting all those journalists that have voiced their concern to you and not providing any type of stats ? What kind of research is that? Hearsay as statistical evidence? And you get to publish a book on information that would be thrown out of any serious academic study…..show the data….where are the percentages, probabilities the the control group, the original hypothesis? Aren’t you a professor? Methodology? Methodology? Methodology?
June 1, 2011 at 2:06 pm
greg Philo
I suggest read the book and make a judgement on the published evidence. If you don’t agree do your own study, and count the references, as I said. We also did focus groups which confirmed how people remembered the position outlined by one side. If we had found anything different we would have reported it. our methods are all laid out in the text.
June 1, 2011 at 3:02 pm
MindTheCrap
Very nice, but none of this is even hinted at in your CiF article. All that is apparent there is a predetermined conclusion based on biased assumptions. People tend to hear want they want to hear (e.g. the widely varying interpretations of Obama’s speech). How did you factor that into your research ?
June 2, 2011 at 10:58 am
SarahLeah
Greg Philo, don’t you agree that attitudes are influenced by context and may be affected previous exposure to the points under discussion?
I wouldn’t buy your book, and am not inclined to read it because I doubt that I could get out of my mind the show you put on at SOAS at http://palestinevideo.blogspot.com/2011/05/john-pilger-and-greg-philo-discuss.html which is seriously off-putting, not to mention the company you choose to keep, see https://richardmillett.wordpress.com/tag/greg-philo/
I’d prefer to come at your book, if I ever got over your distortions and delivery in the SOAS performance, from a sort of “blank slate” approach so as to be able to be fair about it, but quite frankly you and the company you keep have put me off.
June 2, 2011 at 11:04 am
Yvonne
The published evidence has been criticised because the methodology was deemed to be flawed, Greg Philo, see
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d3Brennan-2.pdf
How do you think your own anti-Israel bias has coloured your research focus?
June 4, 2011 at 8:34 am
Groovy Times
Philo reminds me of a Nazi doctor, using pseudo-science to ‘prove’ his own prejudices and pre-coneceptions to be objective and at the forefront of progress and modern thinking.
The truth about the Jews / Zionists is revealed the the infallibility of his scientific methodology. Who, apart from but a war-mongering, power-grabbing, land-stealing, child-killing apologist would argue with that?
BTW, I wonder if he has a pair of those head-measuring calipers in his anti-Zionist arsenal?
January 5, 2012 at 2:12 am
Kyanna
Could you write about Phsiycs so I can pass Science class?
January 5, 2012 at 1:30 pm
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