Comment Trail:

I've been spending too much time on The New Republic:

Editing as a strategy to win friends and defeat enemies

Discombobulating American Jews

Job search in Israel

Art thou contented, Jew? Margaret Drabble picks up her skirts and tip toes among the Jews and the antisemites, while trying to keep herself clean of both as well as a friend of both. though she seems singularly deaf to antisemitic music around her.

I left the following comment:

"...the BBC probably gets it right, and its veteran reporter on the Middle East, Jeremy Bowen, is reassuringly reliable, rising calmly above the waves of partisan extremism." [Drabble opines]

1. "In a significant ruling, the BBC's highest body has substantially upheld CAMERA's complaint that BBC News's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen violated the broadcaster's guidelines that require impartiality and accuracy. Below is CAMERA's press release on the breaking development."

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=12&x_article=1655

2. Following the terrorist massacre at a Jewish religious highschool in Jerusalem, the BBC's Jeremy Bowen enters the mind of a murderer to make excuses:

."..the school was no ordinary seminary. It was the ideological cradle of the settler movement in the West Bank, which could be the reason it was targeted."

http://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/2008/03/terrorism-excused-following-yesterdays.html

3. "A BBC mole has sent me this briefing for BBC staff from the BBC's Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on what lies ahead this year.

It’s all too predictable. The "fragmentation" of Palestinian society has, in Mr Bowen’s view, nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with Israel (“the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government�). Indeed, Israel is to blame for almost everything. The Palestinians are not responsible for anything; Israel is the culpable party.

He has contempt for every Israeli politician he mentions; Ehud Barak, for instance, is described as having killed "various Palestinians", written as if he did so for the sake of it.

If this is what passes for high-level analysis at the BBC, is it any wonder its reporting is so poisonous?"

http://www.stephenpollard.net/003098.html/

_____________

These are the expressions and reports of Drabble's "reassuringly reliable, rising calmly above the waves of partisan extremism." Bowen. Her words, with the testimonials so divorced from the image she wishes to invoke, remind me of Anne Carson's description of liars:

"What really connects words and things?

Not much, decided my husband

and proceeded to use language

in the way that Homer says the gods do.

All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings

alongside our meanings.

They flip the switch at will. "