Eric Moonman

                                                                     


My Four Years Holding The World's Media To Account

Thursday 21st 2010f January 2010

This week, the fourth anniversary of my first On The Media column for the Jewish News, seems the perfect opportunity to look back and take stock of how the Jewish community has been portrayed in the world's media since 2006.

Back then, my very first article highlighted Hamas terrorist activity and urged the EU to suspend the planned grants to the group. Around the same time Israel was targeted with calls for boycotts from two unlikely quarters. A group of architects devised the Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP). Their leader, Abe Hayeem, is a Jew and left-wing activist who lives in London.

In another boycott, the Church of England Synod's vote against Israeli investments brought a courageous reaction from the Chief Rabbi. I urged a full disclosure of the Synod's portfolio and I questioned why "a charity like the Church of England should be gambling money on the stock exchange." (March 2006).

By April there was interest in Lord Levy and his "fundraising skills'. I wrote that (to date) what had happened on the cash-for-honours row was not illegal but I felt that Michael would be prudent to use his particular talents in other areas. I also pointed out that in the Labour Party at constituency and ward level (quite apart from the national media), there was a sharp reaction against all who engineered these "deals for honours".

Outside the Wembley Yam Ha'atzmut celebration in 2006, the behaviour of Neturei Karta shocked many as they burned Israel flags, which was inevitably pictured in much of the press. I urged the Jewish leadership council to confront NK but I don't believe they ever did.

Jewish organisations and their feuding made headlines in the national and international press. The JNF and the KKL seemed disinclined to resolve their dispute within the community, resulting in the involvement of lawyers and fruitless acrimony. I said then, and repeat now, that a litigant would do well to read Rashi before heading to court.

In February 2007 I considered how, in 1966, there were 46 Jewish MPs while in 2007 the number stood at 22. But this doesn't take into account whether these MPs have the will to stand up and argue the Jewish case, let alone defend Israel. Of course, there are exceptions. Some MPS like Louise Ellman (Lab, Riverside) and Lee Scott (Con, Ilford North) do speak out. But there are simply too many Jewish MPs who need to be reminded of their roots.

The following year the Independent offered a chilling reminder of the high cost of speaking out in Russia. A prominent human rights lawyer and a journalist were gunned down by a masked assassin in broad daylight. More than one thousand people gathered at Grozny to condemn the shootings.

My tribute to the life and writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels, brought many appreciative calls from readers in August 2008. Later that year I urged correspondents who spend time in media monitoring to hunt out material in unlikely places. By all means continue to search through the extremist literature of the left and right, but also take a hard look at the small circulation newspapers and magazines.

There are many distortions that appear in public that we don't react to. I consider this is a mistake. My advice is challenge every assertion. At meetings I have to correct speakers who claim, for example: "There are two million Jews in Britain..."

Consider this claim, by Abu Hamza to an Old Bailey jury in February 2008: "The Jews control the media."

Mind you, he also argued that we control the British Foreign Office and banks. The radical Muslim preacher is currently serving a seven-year sentence at Her Majesty's pleasure.

I also wrote about how France tightened its attitude towards the Muslim dress code and lifestyle. A Muslim member of the French government attacked the head-to-toe Islamic dress as a "prison", applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wore it. "The burka is a strait-jacket," Fadel Amara, the Minister for Urban Affairs and a longstanding women's rights campaigner, told The Times in July 2008.

Finally, Father Tim Jones told parishioners to ignore one of the Ten Commandments and shop lift if they are forced to in 2009. I made three calls to rabbis to seek a Jewish view. They provoked "no comment" from two of them while the third merely uttered, "Gevalt!".


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