Journalists gone wild

Editorial

Just when you thought you'd seen everything in the world of anti-Israel madness, along comes Britain's National Union of Journalists.

Earlier this month, in one of the most perplexing acts ever by members of their profession, journalists voted 66-54 at their annual meeting to boycott Israeli goods, condemn Israel in the most purple prose imaginable and call on the British government to impose sanctions on Israel. The resolution called the war against Hezbollah last summer a "savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon" and accused Israel of a "slaughter of civilians in Gaza."

There have been a number of leading journalists who have condemned the resolution as running diametrically counter to the values journalists should hold. And the vote was by no means a landslide – passing by a margin of 66 to 54. But it should have been a landslide. It should have been defeated by massive margins or never come before the plenary in the first place. Anything short of a complete rebuke of such an outlandish proposal constitutes the defeat of reason.

We've seen this kind of condemnation before. This over-the-top approach was typified by the effort, now thankfully abandoned, to boycott Israeli academics. The academic boycott – an attempt to cut off from the world academy professors and researchers from Israel – eventually struck even jaded Israel-haters as a ludicrous and self-defeating concept. Boycotting Israeli goods may have little impact on the economies of most countries. But boycotting Israeli ideas is a modern form of book-burning and even the most ardent Zion-bashers saw the incompatibility between their profession and the idea that the country with the highest per capita publication of academic research should be excluded from universities worldwide.

This incompatibility has apparently not yet struck some British journalists. Blinded, apparently, by a duty to some perverted ethical motivation to single out Israel from among the nations for unique and unparallelled condemnation, the journalists have defamed mostly themselves. The fourth estate is already a maligned force in Western society. The National Union of Journalists, in its vote this month, has perpetuated the idea that journalism has lost its bearings.

The job of journalists is to report. There is, of course, a place in most media for divergent opinions and editorials. But for a body representing professional journalists to take a stand on an international issue of this centrality – and to do so in a way that is so obviously biased against one party in a two-party conflict – is far beneath the dignity and standards of professional journalism.

By involving themselves in this issue in such a biased and deceptive manner, these journalists undermine their credibility and, to an extent, that of all people in this field. How can readers of British media expect that their "news" is accurate, fair and balanced, when they know that the individuals reporting it belong to an organization that explicitly takes political stands that not only defy balance, but also good sense and historical fact?

If there is an ultimate irony in this ghastly ironic incident, it is that these very journalists who are expressing their ill-formed and slanted view from afar would be unable to practise their craft, such as it is, in any Middle Eastern country except Israel. There is not another country in the Middle East, and only a rare few in the world, where standards of media freedom and free expression reach the pinnacle they do in Israel. For journalists to have the freedom to express themselves the way the National Union of Journalists has is unthinkable in Lebanon, Syria or any of the other states in the region, save Israel. This reality does not elicit frantic, hysterical calls for justice. Only silence.

Meanwhile, as the only democracy in the region struggles to hold off a 60-year-old promise by its combined neighbors to eliminate Israel's presence from the planet, British journalists cheer like drunken football yobs in support of those who rid the world of the Jewish state. As if we needed a reminder that the world's prejudice against Israel knows no bounds.

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