Sim-O

antiwar.com:

After ordering a cameraman to turn off his camera, Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem engaged in a very frank discussion about the recent Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, calling it “a preintroduction” to an attack on Iran that Israel apparently expects within the year.

Before the camera was turned off, Ambassador Rotem said “the best thing to do is to have a very open dialogue if there are no reporters or journalists here,” adding “I am far more reserved in the way I am saying my things (on camera).” Unbeknownst to him however Sarah Cummings, a reporter for Australia’s Seven News service, was actually in attendance at the meeting after having been “accidentally” invited.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, and while its officials have repeatedly attempted to tie the Iranian government to its war on the Gaza Strip this is the first time one of their officials has publicly (if inadvertently so) suggested that the attack on the strip was a warm-up to its long talked about attack on Iran.

Via

Adbusters:

On February 29 last year the BBC’s website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a ‘holocaust’ on Gaza. Headlined “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust,’” the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over, the headline would read “Gaza militants ‘risking disaster.’” (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai’s comments). An Israeli threatening ‘holocaust’ may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state’s criminal behaviour. With the ‘holocaust’ reference redacted, the new headline shifted culpability neatly into the hands of ‘Gaza militants’ instead.

One could argue that the BBC’s radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel lobby’s well-oiled flak machine is notorious. But, as I will show in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel’s image. The norm is reflexive self-censorship. To establish evidence of the BBC’s journalistic malpractice one often has to do no more than pick a random sample of news related to the Israel-Palestine conflict currently on its website. In a time of conflict BBC’s coverage invariably tends to the Israeli perspective, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the semantics and framing of its reportage. More so than the quantitative bias – which was meticulously established by the Glasgow University Media Group in their study Bad News from Israel – it is the qualitative tilt that obscures the reality of the situation. This is often achieved by engendering a false parity by stretching the notion of journalistic balance to encompass power, culpability and legitimacy as well. The present conflict is no exception.

Read the rest

Related: Beau Bo D’Or – The BBC reinforces the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza

From an email newsletter received approx 10am today:

Stop the War Coalition
Temporary email address
stopwaruk@gmail.com

STOP THE WAR WEBSITE AND EMAIL ATTACKED

Stop the war has suffered a serious attack on its internet
site, which has been hacked, we assume by supporters of
Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Our website is down and our usual
email address not functioning.

We have set up a temporary email address for you to contact
Stop the War: stopwaruk@gmail.com

We expect to restore normal service soon.