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Tony Lerman is still Israel-bashing on CiF, and readers may judge for themselves whether he is telling us anything new or interesting. The article reflects his own conflicted and tortured relationship with his Jewishness and Zionism (he used to be a youth leader in a Zionist youth group) when he tells us (yet again) that the “cherished assumptions of Zionism” are being questioned by Jews themselves – nothing new here, Jews are nothing if not critical thinkers – and again he pushes his own agenda for a one state solution to the conflict. There is precious little new there and I do not propose to go further into it.
The whole thread is, however, a prime example of the sort of confusion brought about when a moderator/staff member is allowed to comment freely and give opinions on the thread. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, this, from a person whose agenda is plain and who is more powerful than the commenters whose contributions he can easily get removed, is neither professional nor ethical. Lerman seems unable or unwilling to defend himself, so Matt Seaton has once again taken upon himself the mantle of his rescuer. The result is highly educative about the “group mind” of CiF and is painful and hilarious by turns. It seems that Seaton still has not learned to stop digging when he is in a hole.
There seem to be two parallel themes in this thread – one being the deletion of MarkGardner1′s post (Mark Gardner is Director of Communications at the Community Security Trust): His post, which follows, was deleted but subsequently reinstated following an appeal to the moderators by Seaton:
Seaton’s comment about Mark Gardner’s post follows. I would imagine that the moderators were wobbled by Mark Gardner’s notion that people should make up their own minds. Note also that Seaton says that the moderators “have exercised some latitude” presumably about what is or is not off-topic It would appear so, otherwise most of Seaton’s subsequent comments to the following might have been deleted too:
“It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
William Ralph Inge; Outspoken Essays: First Series (1919) ‘Patriotism’
There is so much that is just so fundamentally wrong about Azzam Tamimi’s CiF article of May 4th that by the time I had finished reading it for the third time, my built-in bullshit detector was in overdrive. In a way, this piece represents the essence of the Through the Looking Glass-style malaise which appears to have colonised worryingly large sections of contemporary British society.
Here the Guardian provides the sheep’s clothing which enables the despicable Tamimi not only to present himself as though he were some kind of moderate voice of reason, but also to play the victim card. Tamimi commences by recounting his version of a 2002 event recorded by the BBC, but no link to the programme or transcript of it is provided; a fact which does not appear to worry Matt Seaton in the slightest. In other words, the Guardian apparently has no problem publishing something it cannot verify, at least when it comes from this particular, but hardly uncontroversial, source – a fact which in itself speaks volumes.
Inspired by our friends at TheBrothersofJudea who track antisemitsm at the Huffington Post, we have collated some statistical data for the month of March to demonstrate the extent of the anti-Israel bias and Israel-obsession at “Comment is Free”.
As can be seen below, of the twenty-seven articles in “Comment is Free: Middle East” on Israel in the month of March, nineteen of them harbored anti-Israel bias in varying degrees. Among the slate of anti-Israel articles there was one by anti-Zionist, Abe Hayeem attacking the Jewish right of return, a piece by Oliver Miles, the former UK ambassador who objected to the presence of two eminent Jewish historians on the Iraq War Enquiry Panel, two articles supporting the engagement of the Jew-hating terrorist group, Hamas, and two articles touting the launch of the anti-Zionist news outlet, JNews. In addition, the roster of anti-Israel articles featured several pieces on the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador for Israel’s purported role in the assassination of a senior member of Hamas and the growing tension between Netanyahu and the Obama administration.
And when we compare Israel articles as a whole with articles relating to the other 16 countries in the region in “Comment is Free: Middle East” we discover that over 40% of the articles in March covered Israel. This in a month when Yemen declared an end to its six-year conflict with Houthis fighters, terrorist attacks in Iraq killed scores of innocents, elections took place in Iraq, clashes broke out between Coptic Christians and Muslims in Egypt, the Arab League held its annual summit in Libya, mass arrests of terrorists were made in Saudi Arabia, Tantawi, Sunni Islam’s top cleric, died and in Iran the Persian new year was celebrated.
In this final pie chart you can see how the negative portrayal of Israel fits into “Comment is Free: Middle East” as a whole.
In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle on February 19 responding to my article in the Jewish Chronicle, outgoing editors, Matt Seaton and Georgina Henry, wrote:
[W]e remain resolutely committed to the CP Scott-inspired tradition of fairness and balance, and publishing a broad range of views (on the Middle East, as on all topics).
In the words of Geoffrey Alderman, “Pull the other one Matt”.
We were recently informed that staff changes are to take effect at the Guardian with Matt Seaton moving to CiF America and a vacancy for a new CiF editor becoming available. Readers of this site will no doubt be asking themselves if some of the new brooms brought in to CiF will be up to the task of sweeping clean the Guardian’s website of its more unsavoury aspects such as the one-sidedness of its Middle East coverage, the hosting of some dubious above the line writers, the tolerance of below the line bigotry and antisemitism or the obsession ad infinitum with all things Israeli, no matter how banal.
Taking on the responsibility for comment is Katharine Viner, currently Deputy and Saturday Editor. Here, in her own words, is a glimpse into Ms. Viner’s world.
“I’d heard from American friends that life for dissenters had been getting worse – wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing anti-war T-shirts, Muslim professors denied visas. But it’s hard to tell from afar how bad things really are. Here was personal proof that the political climate is continuing to shift disturbingly, narrowing the scope of free debate and artistic expression.“
In the above paragraph Katharine Viner is referring to the postponement of the showing of the play she co-edited with Alan Rickman ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’. The ‘Times’ review of the play stated that “an element of unvarnished propaganda comes to the fore. With no attempt made to set the violence in context, we are left with the impression of unarmed civilians being crushed by faceless militarists.”
This is a cross-post from Judeosphere
Haaretz has just published an interview with Matt Seaton, editor of “Comment is Free” (CiF)—the opinion website of the Guardian, with 3 million unique users and 10 million page-views a month.
It has not gone unnoticed by critics that CiF—and the British media in general—has a bit of an obsession when it comes to Israel. Seaton reacts to this accusation:
We spend a great deal of time thinking how to cover the subject in a balanced and fair way and not in excessive quantity. It’s difficult to do that when the Middle East is setting the news agenda. The Arab-Israeli conflict is also a fault-line in the geopolitics of the region. That’s just a reality…..It’s a region of the world that generates so much news; we’re part of that, but it’s not of our making.
Actually, dude, it is of your making. The fault of the Guardian—and other media outlets and pundits—is constantly reinforcing the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important, central issue driving events in the Middle East. (The ongoing Sunni-Shiite dispute is arguably a larger, more influential geopolitical fault-line.)
Yesterday the Guardian celebrated the fourth birthday of “Comment is Free”. For us however there was another cause for celebration – Georgina Henry, executive comment editor of “Comment is Free”, announced in the birthday thread that she is leaving CiF and moving to another role in the Guardian.
From the horses mouth (literally):
I have to say that in reading this I have to agree with Henry on one thing – her comment about ATL (above the line) and BTL (below the line) “bring[ing] out the best in each other”. Take for example the Nicholas Blincoe ATL article a couple of months ago lambasting the settler movement that produced a comment from one of the BTL regulars calling for the slaughter of Jewish settlers down to the “last man, woman and child”. The anti-Israel venom pouring out of the Blincoe thread certainly brought out the best of William Bapthorpe, the commenter who made this statement. And the nurturing of the anti-Israel narrative is par for the course both above the line in the editorial selection of anti-Israel writers and below the line with biased moderators that stamp out any dissent challenging the conventional wisdom of the anti-Israel narrative.
In a prelude to the fourth anniversary of CiF, Henry made a telling admission in an article she penned:
“The one reliable truth about the internet is that it never stands still. Competitors come … and keep coming. Change is constant. You have to work harder to understand and retain the loyalty of your community.”
And peddling in the lies of the anti-Israel narrative is a sure way to help retain that loyalty given the make up of the CiF guardianista community.
In the same thread that Henry made her announcement, Matt Seaton posed the question “Does Cif make a difference? You tell us.” I prefer to phrase the question in a slightly different way as I did in my article in the Jewish Chronicle “What makes Cif different?” There I stated that the “Guardian’s flagship blog reeks of antisemitism”. Its a statement that holds true from the launch of “Comment is Free” four years ago right through to the present day. That is the true legacy of Georgina Henry.
The question is will Henry’s successor pick up from where she left off or will her successor be bold enough to clean house.
Perhaps the more intriguing question is what is the reason behind Henry’s departure and to what extent did CiF Watch play a role in all of this?
From the birthday thread:
The question is which Talk Policy does Matt Seaton, Chief of Thought Police, mean – this or this?
This is cross posted from Jonathan Hoffman’s blog on the the JC website
The story so far: In last week’s JC, Professor Geoffrey Alderman revealed that Matt Seaton, editor of Guardian “Comment Is Free” (CIF), had given him a ‘gun at head’ ultimatum: choose between writing for CiFWatch (the brilliant forensic website that keeps tabs on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on CIF) and CIF. In addition Alderman related that he was being premoderated by CIF (in CIFspeak “premoderating” is pretty much a synonym for “banning”). Further, he wrote “the fact is that the anti-Zionist contributions to CiF far outweigh the pro-Zionist ones”. Of the articles published on CIF he wrote “slowly but surely, CIF … has become a platform for the crudest propaganda that can only have been intended to foster a hatred of the Jewish state.“
Matt Seaton promptly demanded the “right of reply” in the JC. Quite why – when he has his own newspaper in which to “reply” – is unclear. It suggests an Editor who is profoundly unsure of his ground. Today his reply was published, but the JC gave Alderman the chance of a rejoinder.
Matt Seaton justified the premoderation by the risible claim that Professor Alderman had compared Palestinians to Nazis. A word of background: the comment in question was in the thread below an article by Seth Freedman on 22 January about the connection between Israel’s rescue work in Haiti and its alleged lack of concern for the Palestinians in Gaza. Alderman’s comment was deleted but in his rejoinder, he says that Seaton’s assertion is both “incorrect and mischievous”: he entered a debate on the balance between compassion for fellow human beings and the need to fight an enemy, arguing that “the fact that Nazis were human beings did not deter the wartime allies from destroying the Nazi state. I made an analogy, not a comparison”.
Apparently, a certain someone is a bit bent out of shape as a result of revelations of how threats were made against Professor Geoffrey Alderman for writing for CiF Watch, as was reported by Professor Alderman in this week’s Jewish Chronicle.
Ahh. The hallowed right of reply. Just like the one that you gave to Robin Shepherd when Antony Lerman misrepresented Shepherd’s excellent book, A State Beyond the Pale?
Matt, your chutzpah knows no bounds and you should be utterly ashamed of yourself.
All I can say is that the chickens are coming home to roost and that if the Guardian was run like any normal organization, you, Georgina and Brian would all have been slung out onto the streets a long time ago.
It appears that the Guardian has finally banned William Bapthorpe, the infamous commenter that publicly advocated the slaughter of Jews. If you click here, you’ll see all his comments have been deleted.
I wonder why it took so long to do the decent thing and ban him? Well better late than never Matt.
While your at it though, how about Banning the Ant for Holocaust denial or is he/she too in your circle of trust?
Charles Moore reports in the Jan 16, 2010 edition of the Spectator on the William Bapthorpe affair. (h/t John)
Check out Moore’s take on the affair three paragraphs down.
And despite all of this Seaton still stands firm refusing to permanently ban Bapthorpe.
On the Lerman thread yesterday, a certain poster going by the name of ‘verytroubled’ posted this:
14 Jan 2010, 1:14PM
I’ve been reading the Guardian’s CIF for some time now, and I still can’t understand why the Guardian seems to be making every effort to pretend that anti-semitism just isn’t a problem.
Are the owners and editors of the Guardian Jewish? Have they experienced hatred due to their religious beliefs?
Is anti-semitism any less offensive than any other form of hatred or racism? Should Jews, particularly after everything they have experienced in the world, feel that anti-Jewish rantings, threats, firebombings belittling of their problems, calling them apes and pigs, and so on, just ignore all of this hatred?
Why does the Guardian continue to insist that anti-semitism is an experience created by Jews for Jews?
It should (and could) have been so simple. All Matt Seaton had to do was to issue a statement along the following lines:
“CiF of course finds the comment made by ‘William Bapthorpe’ entirely unacceptable and this poster has been permanently banned from the CiF site as a result. CiF wishes to apologise for any distress caused in the time between the comment being posted and its deletion by our moderators. CiF will exercise additional vigilance in the future and wishes to make it clear that the posting of racist comments will result in an immediate and permanent ban from the site.”
But he didn’t. Instead, we got a rather mealy-mouthed and somewhat begrudging post on Robin Shepherd’s blog which concentrates upon the technicalities of banning and pre-moderation, but comes nowhere near to addressing the actual issue. Why is that?
I think it’s probably fair to say that Matt Seaton didn’t get to where he is today by being bad at his job, and the bottom line of that job is to attract as much traffic as possible to the CiF web site. How is that achieved? Well it seems to me that one possibility is that the Guardian has decided to try to carve its niche in the internet news market by being ‘cutting edge’ and somewhat unconventional, as is reflected in its choice of ‘above the line’ writers quite frequently. In order to be ‘unconventional’, however, one has to be aware of convention, and one accepted convention of modern society is that racism is contradictory to our ideas of a fair, just and healthy society. So if an editor wanted to be really provocative and unconventional, he could, for example, commission articles written by the leader of a racist, theology-based, violent organisation, outlawed in both Britain and the EU, which targets a specific group of people because of their ethnicity such as Khalid Mish’al.
Fortunately, the flouting of conventions in order to attract readers appears to have its limits; as far as I know we have not (thank goodness) been subjected to articles of CiF by advocates of the hanging of gay people in Africa or supporters of Combat 18. So why does the Guardian editorial team see nothing wrong in flouting this particular aspect of one convention alone? Why does a newspaper which most likely considers its readership to be educated people of a liberal left-wing persuasion think that they will be interested in reading articles which promote and excuse bigotry against one particular group of people when they would probably be horrified by bigotry of any other type?
That is because the Guardian is a part of a sub-section of British society in which political antisemitism – as opposed to social antisemitism – is perfectly normal. Whilst Mr. Seaton and many of his readers would no doubt be horrified by the thought that they could be accused of bigotry or racism, they still engage in the most dangerous kind of political antisemitism directed both at the State of Israel and Jews in general. The Guardian’s decision to show a video of the highly offensive and blatantly antisemitic play ‘Seven Jewish Children’, or its equally unfortunate decision to provide a platform for Peter Oborne to peddle his antisemitic conspiracy theories are just two of many examples of its embrace of one specific kind of bigotry and racism. In other words, the Guardian is consciously cultivating an environment in which political antisemitism thrives.
A poster such as ‘William Bapthorpe’ would not write the words he wrote in an environment which he perceived to be intolerant of such statements. Bapthorpe’s comment was particularly extreme, but it is merely the inevitable culmination of years of de-legitimisation of Israel and dehumanisation of Israelis on the CiF website.
One would expect that any true left-leaning liberal would be quite shocked to discover that a newspaper he or she read was attractive to anti-Semites and bigots and begin to ask some very pertinent questions as to how this came about. But Mr. Seaton, who does more than just read CiF, appears remarkably unperturbed by this fact. Indeed he seems quite keen to play along with the situation. Banning ‘William Bapthorpe’ outright would change the rules of the game on CiF; instead he gets a meaningless virtual tap on the wrist. Why? Because, just like governments which put health warnings on cigarettes and yet will never ban them because of the enormous revenue they generate, Matt Seaton knows that the anti-Israel bigotry on CiF is bread and butter, and without it his site would not be nearly as attractive to a certain sub-section of British society in which political antisemitism has become shockingly acceptable and indeed something of a badge of honour.
What is tragic in particular about the climate of opinion being cultivated at CiF, which is obviously deeply worrying both to most Jews and also many non-Jews who are truly anti-racist, is that once upon a time, the Guardian itself would have been at the forefront of efforts to eradicate such a dangerous trend in British society. Now it prefers to play to the gallery. It really is that simple.
For those of you following the William Bapthorpe affair with interest, Mr. “ I want to slaughter Jews” Bapthorpe made an interesting comment about his posting ability (or lack thereof) earlier today.
williambapthorpe’s comment 13 Jan 10, 2:20pm
@JayReilly, did you take your moniker from A Confederacy of Dunces? (Just to show that I know what you’re talking about…) A great novel with a very sad story behind its composition / publication. I had assumed it was your real name. Dunno why, because mine sure as hell isn’t William Bapthorpe.
Anyhoo my comments seem to be taking an age to appear, if at all. Is it this ‘plucking’ business? Anyone else experiencing this? [emphasis added]
How revealing that only now, after more than 80 posts since his now infamous January 6 post, does he complain about the time its taking for his comments to appear. Shouldn’t he have realized by now that for the past week he’s been pre-moderated. At least that was the impression that Matt Seaton chose to give when he said this yesterday:
[r]egarding the post in the Blincoe thread which you respectively have complained about, let me assure you that – contrary to the impression Cif Watch chooses to give – the comment was deleted promptly by moderators, and as per our standard moderation protocol the user has been placed in quarantine as ‘untrusted’.
It seems that Matt is being economical with the truth (and its not the first time) and that in actuality Bapthorpe only went into pre-moderation after CiF Watch published his comment two days ago.
So what conclusions can we infer from this?
Well first, while the moderators on duty deleted Bapthorpe’s post, they clearly didn’t feel that the offensiveness of his post rose to a level that betrayed the “circle of trust”. I would proffer that the reason for this is that the moderators have been exposed to so much demonization of the Israeli “settler” population that they have become completely desensitized to the gravity of calling for their slaughter right down to the “last man, woman and child”.
What is worse though is that this attitude pervades Guardian management. Instead of immediately and permanently banning William Bapthorpe like any self-respecting organization should do, the Guardian has taken the jaw droppingly astonishing (to quote one of our regular readers) step of just pre-moderating Bapthorpe leaving open the possiblity that Bapthorpe may, if he behaves himself in the future (i.e adheres to the Guardian World View), return to the “circle of trust”. And more astonishingly, as I explained yesterday, this step is in contravention of the moderation policy that the Guardian itself holds itself accountable to.
What it boils down to is simply this: while Matt Seaton (and by extension Guardian management) may pay lip service to condemning Bapthorpe’s post, the failure to immediately and permanently ban Bapthorpe sends the message to the Jewish community that anti-Jewish bigots like Bapthorpe are acceptable members of the CiF community.
The inability of Matt Seaton to comprehend the revulsion we feel from this speaks volumes.
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June 27, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Antisemitism, Antony Lerman, Comment is Free, Matt Seaton, Peter Beinart | by Israelinurse | 14 comments
Reading Antony Lerman’s latest CiF offering was about as productive as plaiting sawdust.
Lerman’s attempts to present Zionism as some sort of reactionary stance which is toxic to any green shoots of peace in the Middle East by citing supposed foundations for his view from sources such as Moshe Arens, through the World Zionist Congress to Peter Beinart fall as flat as an under-baked soufflé due to his usual stubborn insistence upon avoiding any mention of the full range of factors which have contributed to the failed peace-making attempts of the past two decades.
With typical sleight of hand, Lerman in this opening paragraph attempts to persuade the reader that there is a link to be made between Zionist ideology and the ‘far right’, thereby attempting to discredit the former by linking it to something the reader will instinctively reject. This does not stand up to scrutiny from any angle: Zionism is something which transcends or precedes political viewpoints for most Israelis and is the mesh which holds this truly multi-cultural and far from ‘post-ideological’ society together.
Neither is it any more true to say that Israel has moved to the right from a political point of view than to make the same statement about the United Kingdom based upon the results of the recent elections there. The party which received the most votes in the last Israeli elections was Kadima, but coalition building sometimes produces strange bed-fellows as the British people should now be finding out. Both the current Likud-led government and the vast majority of the Israeli people today accept and support the concept of a two-state solution; thirty years ago this was an eccentric fringe opinion in Israeli society. If anything, Lerman would be more correct if he pointed out that as in many European countries, the Left in Israel has caused itself to become increasingly less relevant and centrists either mildly to the right or left, but with little to distinguish between their policies and principles, command the majority vote.
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