Archive on 4: Media and the Middle East

I thought this heavily-trailed BBC Radio 4 programme crossed the line from anti-Zionism into antisemitism. Listen to it and judge for yourself:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04gnhnv
This is what I wrote to the BBC:
John Lloyd so slanted this programme against not just Israel, but Jews in general, and so made excuses for Arab violence, that I consider it slips from anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. The Holocaust is belittled; the biblical origins of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel are sneered at, and the Jewish connection to that land from which they were expelled against their will, and to which they wanted to return but were prevented for nearly 1,900 years, is never mentioned. Instead Mr. Lloyd damns all the Jews of Israel as European colonial occupiers. The 800,000 Israeli Jews from Arab lands are airbrushed out of existence. 23 minutes in he quotes Tim Llewellyn approvingly: “Israel is an occupier and the Palestinians are victims”. He damns Irgun as wantonly murderous terrorists while soft-pedalling the murder of the Munich athletes, implying that the very establishment of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948 was a crime against humanity. This fits the EUMC definition of anti-Semitism.

The Liars of Saudi Arabia

Sometimes you just have to call out a liar. The fact is that for more than 20 years the al-Saud ruling family of Arabia have organised a devil’s pact, first with al-Qaeda and now with ‘Islamic State’, whereby they fund the terrorists to the hilt in return for them refraining from overthrowing the House of Saud and taking their fundamentalist mass-murdering ways out to wherever they choose around the world. The only word of truth in this ‘Guardian’ article is the date. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/17/saudi-arabia-not-support-islamic-state-terrorists