The British journalist, Toby Harnden, who has worked in the Middle East and who opposes the NUJ action, writes in the Telegraph that the NUJ has “a childish fixation with trendy-Leftie causes,” of which anti-Israelism is merely the most pronounced.
He notes, for example, an NUJ motion that "applauds the advances made by the Venezuelan people and government in redistributing the country's wealth" since Hugo Chavez came to power and turned that country into a bastion of anti-Americanism and an ally of Iran’s rulers.
Ironically, even as the NUJ is bashing Israel, Alan Johnston, the Gaza correspondent of the BBC is being held captive (and may have been killed) by Palestinian militants. Or maybe that isn’t ironic. Johnson’s kidnapping, the abduction and forced conversions of Fox journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the video-taped decapitation of Daniel Pearl – these and other atrocities are intimidating a growing list of journalists.
With this as backdrop, perhaps the NUJ boycott against Israel should be seen less as bias and more as a kind of tribute -- a sacrifice of journalistic integrity in the hope it may appease the editors who matter most, those who cut not with red pens but with butcher knives, those who produce not packages for the evening news but snuff videos for the Internet.
“The use of media as a weapon [has] an effect parallel to a battle," Hezbollah commander Nabil Qaouk has declared. Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, has observed that more than half of the Islamists' war "is taking place in the battlefield of the media."
That Britain’s National Union of Journalists has now surrendered any pretense of balance and neutrality in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict must be a source of enormous encouragement to such men.
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