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April 27, 2007
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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