ROBIN SHEPHERD: RICHARD FALK’S HYSTERICAL BILE AGAINST ISRAEL
Now, I know that it is no surprise that Richard Falk –United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights since 2008 — has come out with yet more hysterical bile against the State of Israel. This is a man, after all, who in a 2007 article entitled, Slouching toward a
Palestinian Holocaust, said the following: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not”.
In fact he’s said many things like that. He also continues to flirt with 9/11 conspiracy theories along the lines that it was all a plot cooked up by “neo-cons” in the White House. In other words, he’s got all the qualifications you might expect for a senior role with the United Nations Human Rights Council, and to be treated as a credible source for the BBC about problems in the peace process.
So much for Richard Falk. Now bring on the BBC’s UN Correspondent, Barbara Plett — whose
laudatory story about Falk’s report yesterday to the UN General Assembly on Israeli settlements and the need for boycotts is today splashed all over the BBC website. (By the way, does the name Barbara Plett ring any bells? It was Plett, some may recall, who in 2004 admitted on air that she had burst into tears at the sight of the terminally ill Yaser Arafat being helicoptered out of his compound on the West Bank).
Obviously, then, the story makes no mention whatsoever of Falk’s Nazi-Israel comparisons or of his stance on 9/11. To do that would be totally to destroy his credibility and, with it, his message to an uninitiated, non-Israeli and non-Jewish audience that for the most part will never have heard of him before and can reasonably be expected to see him as a UN official who is simply doing his job.
The story pegs off his charge that Israel has made peace impossible by mounting settlement projects in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “so extensive it amounted to de-facto annexation of Palestinian land”. Twice in the report, the BBC gives the illusion of objectivity by noting that the Israelis have called the report biased. But since every government describes sharp criticism as bias the effect of mentioning it is insignificant, as the BBC knows all too well.
What was necessary, and what any objective (non-specialist, non-niche) news outlet not totally mired in a rigidly ideological worldview would do in practice, was simply to quote from Falk’s own articles and speeches in order to help the reader understand precisely why Israel and the rest of us should treat his words with something less than the reverence they are accorded by the BBC. That’s basic journalistic good practice when you are dealing with an audience that you know is unlikely to know very much about the source for your story.
Instead, the main reference to Israel’s objections to Falk’s credibility is manicured into a statement of near-denial about Palestinian terrorism. Get a load of this:
“Israel said the report was utterly biased and served a political agenda, criticising its author for making no mention of what it called Palestinian terrorist attacks”. (My italics). Ah yes, that’s right. To the BBC, there aren’t any Palestinian “terrorists”. Just “militants” engaged in “resistance”.
As a final flourish in the story, Falk is given a global platform by the BBC to advocate for boycott and divestment:
“He urged the UN to support civil society initiatives, such as campaigns to sanction or boycott Israel for alleged violations of international law”.
Of course, the problem here is that the BBC and like-minded media outlets have an obvious get out clause. The United Nations is a very important global institution. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a major international news story. Therefore, what the UN’s top officials say about the issue is in fact newsworthy, as evidenced by the fact that many other media outlets, including in Israel, will cover the same story.
There is as much truth as there is falsehood in such a retort. It is indeed true that the story is newsworthy. The UN matters in international affairs and journalists are right to report on it. The falsehood is in the assumption (dishonestly made or not) of objectivity from an institution packed with extremists, among whom the likes of Richard Falk are not unusual.
And it is here that we get to the nub of the matter. If the BBC were to report on Falk’s statements about the Holocaust, his dalliance with 9/11 conspiracy theories and his other expressions of ideologically motivated extremism, they would have to do it for a whole host of other people and institutions inside and outside the United Nations that sustain the very world view that is shared by a critical mass of BBC journalists and editors. If you’re going to tell the truth about Falks, you have to do it about the Human Rights Council itself, you have to do it about Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Methodist Church in the UK, Breaking the Silence in Israel, mass anti-Semitism in the Palestinian and Arab media and so on endlessly until the worldview you subscribe to becomes totally unsustainable.
This does not require a conscious decision, let alone a matter of BBC policy. It simply requires a sufficiently large number of people to internalise the same set of assumptions and opinions, at which point the groupthink becomes reflexive. You can bet your house that Barbara Plett and the editorial team that helped produce this story have no inkling at all that they have violated what should be considered basic journalistic standards and practices. In their world, their behaviour is reasonable and normal. And so, they would argue, is Richard Falk.
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