| Author | Message | ||
     Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.9.248.146 |
Since we have a lady ("Rita from the city centre") who calls the Radio Merseyside phone-in to accuse the BBC of lying and to promote Press TV as the voice of truth, I thought I'd check out some of the stories she defended on there. I found this: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/181711.html I've left a comment on the site enquiring why they're helping legitimise the Protocols. I'll be interested to see if it appears and is answered. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.21.203 |
Hm! No sign yet of the comment, and it occurs to me to wonder if I can really have been the only person in seven months to try and raise the issue there. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 2.24.1.238 |
I wouldn't hold your breath, Ramsey. Of course, this kind of toxic mythology makes informed and principled criticism of Israel more difficult: it muddies the waters both directly (by reviving influential anti-Semitic lies) and indirectly (by enabling the same lies to become a surrogate for any anti-Zionist perspective). Howard Jacobson's recent novel The Finkler Question is a brilliant, though overly sarcastic, examination of the impact on British Jews of the increasingly ugly and divisive politics of Israel – and the opportunistic revival of anti-Semitism in that context. At one point, a Jewish writer who is active in campaigning for the rights of Palestinians attends a public debate and gets into a bitter argument with someone on his own side. That episode will have resonated with many readers. What's needed, but is rarely found, is an analysis that is not rooted in ethnic or religious definitions of identity but looks at the Israel/Palestine situation in terms of economic and political power. Reports from the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) are very useful in that respect. | ||
| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.166.73 |
Press TV is the British-language arm of Iranian state television; pre-2009 it had a reasonably good reputation for impartiality, I believe. Following Ahmedinejad's (sp?) re-election that's changed a lot, and a number of people who had worked for it have left it on those grounds. If it's become a propaganda channel for Ahmedinejad's government, the regurgitation of the Protocols bullshit isn't much of a surprise. And, as Joel said, I wouldn't hold your breath for a response... |