The Reporting of Iraq and Israel:
An Abuse of Media Power

by Melanie Phillips

Delivered at Limmud Conference, UK, December 2004
First delivered at Boston Conversazione, USA, October 2004

I’d like to start with three short anecdotes.

A friend went into Blackwells university bookshop in Oxford and asked the counter clerk: ‘Do you have a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel?’ ‘There is no case for Israel’, the counter clerk replied.

A distinguished and influential military figure confided to me that Rupert Murdoch had given a personal order that articles in The Times against the Iraq war should be drastically limited — and that he had done so, ‘on the instruction of the Jewish lobby in America’. Furthermore, George Bush had invaded Iraq because ‘he had Ariel Sharon’s hand up his back’.

At a recording of the BBC radio panel show Any Questions, in the solid Conservative heartland of Wokingham in Berkshire, an overwhelmingly conservative audience applauded and cheered the veteran far-left activist Tariq Ali when he said that that America was the fount of world terror, that George Bush was more of a danger to the world than Saddam Hussein, and that if any country was a menace to world peace through its weapons of mass destruction it was not Iraq but Israel.

How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view — hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles — that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy — Israel — that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?

Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.

This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them.

Yet that is what is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on their heads. Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to be understood and sympathised with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous climate in which prejudice and lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable fact; a climate which is now being eagerly manipulated by terrorists who know that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute the video the result will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split away from President Bush and shatter the coalition in defence of the free world.

The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this mindset are excised from the debate altogether.

In this talk, I will first of all look at the twisting of the reporting, then suggest why this has happened and then finally discuss the effect it is having.

The reporting of Iraq is not actually about Iraq at all. From the start, there has been very little attempt to produce a balanced picture of a highly complex situation. Instead, the media has viewed everything that has happened through a prism of opposition based on the certainty that Bush and Blair took their countries to war on a lie.

Of course, some media organisations supported the war in Iraq. But the anti-war mindset quickly came to dominate the debate, in my view largely because of the BBC, whose influence over the country — particularly over conservatively-minded people who tend to regard the Beeb as their secular church-cannot be over-estimated. The nature of that influence could be gauged very early on by the reaction during the war of the crew of the flagship Royal Navy carrier Ark Royal, whose crew turned off the BBC because of its relentless defeatism and negatively skewed reporting — which was so outrageous it even drew a protest from its own correspondent in the war zone.

For the BBC and other media, there was always one story about Iraq — that the war was a criminal folly. Their original predictions that Saddam would not be toppled, of mass uprisings all over the Arab world, of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis turned into refugees proved wrong. So they kept shifting the goalposts and rewrote history to prove that Bush and Blair were malign or stupid or both. When no WMD were found, they seized on this to claim that the war was only fought because we were told there were WMD stockpiles. What started as argument about how to contain the menace of Saddam has now turned into the assertion that Saddam posed no threat at all. ...

[T]he fact is that for several years, intelligence officials had consistently warned of a continuing effort by Saddam to procure WMD. In March 2002, officials advised: ‘Iraq continues to develop weapons of mass destruction, although our intelligence is poor... Iraq continues with its BW and CW programmes and, if it has not already done so, could produce significant quantities of BW agents within days and CW agent within weeks of a decision to do so. We believe it could deliver CBW by a variety of means, including in ballistic missile warheads. There are also some indications of a continuing nuclear programme. Saddam has used WMD in the past and could do so again if his regime were threatened.’ (JIC, 15 March 2002, Butler report).

So despite the absent caveats and dodgy sources, any fair reading of Butler’s summary of the intelligence would be that the Prime Minister was presented with an overwhelming case that Saddam was still very much in the WMD game.

Blair’s case was always the nexus of WMD and terrorism. Yet Oborne and all the others simply ignore and even deny the evidence of the threat posed by Saddam as a puppetmaster of international terror. It’s not just that Saddam tried to kill President Bush’s father, or paid for and trained Palestinian terrorists. The Senate committee said the CIA was right to believe that Saddam was up to his neck in terrorism against the US throughout the 1990s and was planning further outrages against it in 2002. And although there are no links between Saddam and 9/11, there is considerable evidence of links between Saddam and al Qaeda. ...

[A]ccording to Sabah Khodada, a former captain in the Iraq army who worked at the Salman Pak terrorist training camp south of Baghdad: ‘This camp is specialised in exporting terrorism to the world... Training is mainly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism...They were special trainers or teachers from the Iraqi Intelligence and al-Mukhabarat... We know that Arabs, non-Iraqis who come to train in these kind of camps, are going to be sent to very dangerous and important operations outside Iraq; not inside Iraq. They come in small numbers, and they come with the intention to do some real suicidal operations... We all met with Saddam personally... And he told us we have to take revenge from America. Our duty is to attack and hit American targets in the Gulf, in the Arab world, and all over the world. He said that openly.’ (The Connection, by Stephen Hayes).

Some of this evidence, to be sure, carries health warnings about inconsistencies or unreliability. And its interpretation remains controversial and confusing. On one occasion, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reported to have said there was no hard evidence to link Saddam and al Qaeda — and then promptly claimed he had been ‘misunderstood’ and listed a host of evidence.

But whatever games might have been played in Washington, there’s surely simply too much of such evidence to dismiss. Yet none of it has been reported in Britain. Instead, commentators repeat almost daily the mantra that Saddam was not involved with al Qaeda, was not involved in terrorism at all — and now, preposterously, that Iraq only became associated with terror as a result of Bush and Blair’s war. Having comprehensively denied, omitted, obscured or distorted the facts over Iraq, the media now claim that the only reason for Tony Blair’s actions must be that he is insane.

It is hard to exaggerate the relentless way in which all this nonsense has been promulgated by the media. So why has the coverage of Iraq been so obsessional? Is it just hatred of America? But why should America — or Bush, for that matter — be hated with this pathological level of intensity?

A crucial part of this frenzy has been the firm belief that Iraq was the wrong target. And that’s because the media knew what the real target should be. The real cause of terror, goes the prevailing wisdom, is Israel’s perceived refusal to grant a state to the Palestinians — a misapprehension unfortunately given weight by pronouncements by Tony Blair himself, who has said that solving the Israel/Palestinian impasse would make the greatest contribution to the war against terror. He has it precisely the wrong way round: only by ridding the world of the sources of terror will the Israel/Palestinian conflict be solved. His inability to give the British public a correct perspective on the relationship between Israel and terror has undoubtedly been a major factor behind both Britain’s extreme animosity towards Israel and, ironically, its hostility to Blair’s policy on Iraq.

Many articles denouncing the Iraq war contain the giveaway sentence, that it had diverted attention from the real cause of instability: the Israel/Palestine conflict. And some go further. One prominent and distinguished commentator told me that the real issue behind the Islamic jihad was Israel. ‘Really’, he said, ‘it would have been better if Israel had never been created.’

So Israel is at the core of the fury over Iraq. Yet Israel can hardly be the principal goad for a movement which declares its aim to establish an Islamic state in the north Caucasus or in southern Asia. But then, the real nature of the threat posed by the Islamic jihad is never reported either. The butchers of Beslan were referred to constantly as Chechens or separatists when the evidence was that they came from neighbouring states, that some of them were Arabs and that their goal — according to their leader — was not Chechen separatism at all but an Islamic state in the north Caucasus.

This coyness extends also to failing to report the announced goals of the jihad. So most people are quite unaware that these goals are the defeat of western power, the overthrow of western values including democracy wherever Muslims either live or have a historic claim, and the re-establishment of the medieval Islamic caliphate which stretches from Asia to southern Europe. Most people are quite unaware, because the media doesn’t report it, that human bomb terrorism which is ascribed to ‘a few unrepresentative extremists’ has been sanctioned by various Arab and Muslim states and Islamic religious authorities. They are unaware, because the media doesn’t report it, that the hysteria which has produced the human bomb death cult is fuelled by demented propaganda which tells them that the west is out to destroy Islam and that the west is dominated by the Jews who control the media and the money markets and whose particular programme this is.

Unaware of this, people ask themselves what can possibly cause human beings to behave in such a barbaric way. And in their media-induced ignorance, they conclude the only reason must be despair and dispossession. And so they fix on Israel as the cause, because through the relentless TV pictures of Palestinians weeping in the rubble of houses demolished by the Israeli army, with a running commentary which predicates the myth of Israeli tanks against Palestinian stones, they are provided with a neat cause of righteous armchair indignation. The obscenity of using even children as human bombs focuses British ire not at the Palestinians for doing so but at Israel, their target. The actual causes of the slaughter — the indoctrination from the cradle in gross Jew hatred, paranoid delusions about the west and a cult of death sanctified and even mandated by religious edict — are studiously ignored by the media which presents it instead as a dispute over land.

The fact that Islamic terrorism is occurring from Bali to Beslan does not dent the certainty that it’s all the fault of Israel. Even though the bombing of the Bali nightclub was perpetrated by a sect whose aim is a pan south-east Asia Islamist superstate, the Independent and other commentators nevertheless claimed that the root cause was the Palestinian problem.

So why are people so irrationally fixated upon Israel as the cause of the world’s troubles? One reason is the excessively disproportionate and obsessive attention paid to it, as opposed to other parts of the world where far worse is happening. For twenty years, the British media simply ignored the slaughter of three million Christians by Muslim Arab militias in the Sudan. And who knows or cares about the massacres in Kashmir, another iconic dispute for jihadists? And when they are reported, the word Muslim is usually absent. Yet the BBC and others never lose an opportunity to refer to outrages by the ‘Jewish’ settlers in the West Bank.

Moreover, Israel itself is shamefully misrepresented by the British media. As in other parts of Europe, Israel is now demonised in a way that goes way beyond legitimate criticism. The one democracy in the Middle East is being delegitimised as a pariah state, while the media is silent on the despotisms that try to destroy it. Of course, it sometimes behaves badly and should be criticised. But it is held to impossibly high standards of behaviour which are expected of no other country. Its every action is reported malevolently, ascribing to it the worst possible motives and denying its own victimisation. Instead of the truth, which is that every military action is taken solely to protect itself from attack, it is portrayed falsely as instigating the violent oppression of Palestinians.

Such an approach is rooted in the media’s astonishing ignorance of history and wilful distortions. The Middle East tragedy is patently not about a Palestinian state, which could have been established any time between 1947 and 1967, and which was actually offered both in 1947 and in 2000, when the only response was an unprecedented campaign of mass murder. Journalists talk about the ‘occupied territories’ without ever saying this is not an aggressive occupation - as is, for example, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which is simply ignored - but in Israel’s case it is perfectly legal to hold land where the belligerent entity that has attacked it in the first place still regards itself as in a state of war against it.

The media constantly present Israel’s behaviour as brutal and disproportionate. And yes, sometimes it is - and it should be condemned when this is so. Yet there is no acknowledgement of the substantial attrition rate suffered by its forces by choosing to conduct house to house searches in order to minimise innocent casualties rather than bomb from the air, as the Americans would undoubtedly do to minimise their own casualty rate. Indeed, in the battle of Jenin in 2002 when Israel went in to root out terrorists, the media described it as a massacre with hugely inflated figures of hundreds of dead Palestinians. The massacre story ran for days, even in newspapers whose editorial line is sympathetic to Israel. Yet the facts were that only 52 Palestinians died, of whom the vast majority were armed men, and no fewer than 23 Israeli soldiers — an extraordinarily high attrition rate. But the false impression created by the media libel remains to this day.

But then to much of the media, Israel’s self-defence is regarded as intrinsically illegitimate. It is routinely described as ‘vengeance’ or ‘punishment’. Sir Max Hastings wrote last September: ‘Israel does itself relentless harm by venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people.’ (Guardian, September 6 2004).

Indeed, he made clear in this article that he regarded attempts by Israel or Russia to defend themselves against terror by killing terrorists as the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes. He also suggested that Israel had never attempted any political resolution of its conflict with the Palestinians — astonishingly ignoring the fact that the current intifada was their response to a political process in which Israel was offering them a state of their own. Thus Hastings managed to present the Israeli victims of terror as Nazi-style butchers while the murderous aggression of the Palestinians, whose own demonology of the Jews is sometimes redolent of Nazi images of a subhuman race, was ignored altogether.

But probably the greatest single reason for the obsessive and unbalanced focus on Israel, along with the irrationality over Iraq, is the hostility and prejudice of the BBC’s reporting. Unlike newspapers, the BBC is trusted as a paradigm of fairness and objectivity. In fact, it views the world from a political position which is similar to that of the Guardian or Independent. In other words, its default position is the left. And since it regards this as the political centre of gravity, it cannot acknowledge its own bias. The BBC is thus a perfectly closed thought system.

When it comes to Israel, it persistently presents it in the worst possible light. It language and tone are loaded, it handles Arab and Israeli interviewees with double standards, and panel discussions are generally skewed with two or three speakers hostile to Israel against one defender or, more often, none at all.

The BBC’s bias against Israel is simply staggering. A 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat described him as a ‘hero’ and an ‘icon’, and spoke of him as having ‘performer’s flare’, ‘charisma and style’, ‘personal courage’, and being ‘the stuff of legends’. Ariel Sharon, by contrast, was subjected to a mock ‘war crimes’ trial.

It constantly presents the Israelis as the aggressors and responsible for the violence in the Middle East — the opposite of the truth. And it wears its heart on its sleeve for the Palestinians who are presented not as aggressors motivated to murder by brainwashing in hatred of Israel and the Jews, but as innocent victims. For example, BBC Radio News said of Israel’s raid into Gaza last autumn to stop the rocket attacks from there upon Israeli citizens that this was ‘making Israeli streets safe perhaps, certainly making life miserable and intolerable for the Palestinians of northern Gaza’.

A previous radio news bulletin reporting Israel’s killing of 14 Hamas terrorists was an object lesson in bias. Reporter Alan Johnston’s language made it sound as if the event was on a par with the recent murder of Russian schoolchildren in Beslan. Thus there would be ‘many funerals’ today for the Hamas ‘faithful’, much ‘anger and grief’. And then came the following startling assertion: ‘The movement is struggling to end Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank’. Thus Johnston presented Hamas as some kind of heroic freedom fighters ‘struggling’ — a loaded word if ever there was one — against colonial oppression. But Hamas of course does not seek merely to end Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank. It aims to eradicate Israel altogether as a Jewish state.

That particular week, the Today programme broadcast a total of 17 items on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, four items hostile to Israel, and one item complaining that money for the poor was being diverted to the war on terror. It broadcast no items on the murder of six Israeli soldiers and the subsequent murder of five more in Gaza that week, events which were mentioned in passing; no mention of the fact that Palestinians had played football with the heads they cut off murdered Israeli soldiers and even placed one of the heads on a desk while being interviewed; and merely two items, on the same day, on the decapitation in Iraq of the American hostage Nick Berg. Thus the BBC’s objectivity and sense of balance and, indeed, moral values.

Worse still, far from expressing horror and outrage at the rampant medieval and Nazi tropes of Jew-hatred pouring out of Arab and Muslim countries, the British media seems to agree that there is indeed a world Jewish conspiracy linking the Jews of America, Israel and the war in Iraq.

The New Statesman printed an investigation into the power of the ‘Zionist’ lobby in Britain, which it dubbed the ‘kosher conspiracy’ and illustrated by a cover depicting the Star of David piercing the union flag. Similar articles claiming undue Jewish influence over America were published in the Independent and Prospect magazine. When the Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell claimed that both Tony Blair and George Bush were influenced by a ‘cabal’ of powerful Jews — including people who were not Jews at all, but merely had some Jewish ancestry — his remarks were brushed aside indulgently as an embarrassing outburst by a venerable eccentric. The following day, BBC TV Newsnight devoted a substantial item to asking whether Dalyell’s claims were true in the US — an item which left the impression that there was indeed a group of tightly-knit Jews in America who wielded far too much power.

Other distinguished writers have openly claimed the Iraq war was a Jewish plot. The late Anthony Sampson wrote in the Independent: ‘It was the victory of the Pentagon over the State Department which determined American policy in the Middle East, reinforced by the powerful influence of the neo-conservative cabal and the Israeli government’. (Independent, May 1 2004).

The much abused term ‘neo-conservatives’ has become code for Jews who have suborned America. Thus Simon Jenkins, endorsing a recent book, wrote in The Times that: ‘...a small group of neo-conservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people’, that they were ‘traitors to the American conservative tradition’ who achieved a ‘seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11’ and whose ‘first commitment was to the defence of Israel’. ‘With the coming to power of President Bush the neocons deftly substituted the threat of Islam for the threat of communism’ and on that basis ‘sought a “comprehensive revamping of American foreign policy”.’ (Times, July 2 2004)

So according to Jenkins, the Jews possess extraordinary and sinister power which they exercise in a covert way to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind. Thus the Jews have ‘seized’ Washington, are ‘traitors’ to the conservative tradition and by implication to America itself, ‘disdain’ law and diplomacy because they are crazed by power-lust and the desire to kill people, and so ‘deftly’ provided a new threat to terrify the world after communism — a threat which doubtless is a figment of their war-crazed imagination and nothing whatever to do with the fact that an Islamist death-cult, financed, trained and supported by a network of rogue states and which has now fanned out across the globe, has declared war on the west and is busy pursuing that murderous objective.

So why has all this happened? Why has the media succumbed to this epidemic of bigotry, blindness and bias?

One obvious reason is simple fear. In Ramallah, when Arafat was alive, reporters who assembled for a press conference happened to witness a man being frog-marched outside and shot. They were threatened with death if they reported it. In tyrannies or police states where information is hard to get, journalists report what they are told and have neither the language skills nor the freedom to inquire whether it is actually true. At home, journalists are terrified of being tarred and feathered as an Islamophobe or right-wing or worst of all, a Sharon-lover. There is no equivalent fear, it seems, of being thought a Jewhater, which is merely laughed off as another example of Jewish paranoia and Holocaust hysteria.

The second reason is the cult of postmodernism to which the media, like the rest of the intellectual world, has fallen victim. Some time ago, journalism decided that objectivity was bunk and truth was relative. Facts stopped being sacred and news reporting became an expression of opinion. And because truth itself was merely a subjective view, the way was open for propaganda based on lies to be promoted as the truth as long as it fitted the prevailing prejudice.

That prejudice is overwhelmingly the mindset of the left. Since the left demonises America and western capitalism, and lionises the third world and all liberation movements, America or Israel can never be victims, only aggressors, while the Muslim and Arab third world can only be victims because they are the powerless pawns of western imperialism.

This has propelled the left into an unholy alliance with the Arab and Muslim world. As a result, both western leftists and eastern zealots share the perception of America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan, and march shoulder to shoulder behind placards saying ‘No Blood for Oil’ and ‘Death to the Jews’.

But it is not just the left. As some of the examples I’ve quoted suggest, much of this thinking is shared by conservatives, too. Whereas mainstream, conservatively-minded Americans support the war in Iraq and understand that their country is defending itself against an enemy that has declared war upon them, in Britain the conservatively-minded majority believe that the only reason they are under threat is because Tony Blair allied Britain with America’s war on terror. The result is an extraordinary cross-over in which a Labour Prime Minister has become a Republican President’s best ally, while many British conservatives — including, I am told, most of the Parliamentary Conservative Party — were rooting for Senator Kerry to win the presidential election.

Of course, there have always been isolationists, appeasers and Jew-haters on the right, and they are certainly in evidence today. But since the left has thoroughly colonised the media and intellectual life in Britain, public discourse has become so warped that the whole centre of political gravity has shifted so that even many centrist people now subscribe to this view of the world.

The outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all evidence is filtered through the prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by gullibility.

And it is perhaps the single greatest incitement to terror. Terrorism is designed to achieve maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so that pressure is put on the leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot be said too often that what drives al Qaeda is not the exercise of disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its weakness and incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda must surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to fall into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war. These terrorists know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and pressure the British media will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every incentive to ratchet up the atrocities. That’s why the hostage Kenneth Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the media duly do what the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins, and the pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more intolerable.

The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.

It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west’s response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. In the war that has been declared upon the free world, the western media’s abuse of power is perhaps the most lethal weapon of all.

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