generalspeaking

Saturday, March 16, 2013

It may not beat the unbridled anti-Semitism expressed by British peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, who, according to the Times of London, blamed Jews “who own newspapers and TV channels” for his 2009 jail sentence for his role in a fatal car accident. But you have to give Guardian assistant editor Michael White credit for trying.

The trouble started on Thursday when Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein posted a tweet wondering why the BBC had made no mention of the Lord Ahmed story. The tweet apparently annoyed White enough to generate the following unbelievable exchange, dragging settlements into the discussion for no reason:

And that was only the beginning.

As more people challenged White’s apparent need to bring Israel in out of the blue, White dug deeper into his position, sparring with everyone from Jeffrey Goldberg to host of Tweeters puzzled by his increasingly obscure arguments and insults.

Finally, White unleashed his best defense for the BBC’s failure to report thye brazen anti-Semitism from a Peer. The delay was caused by the BBC’s need to check its sources since Lord Ahmed’s interview was conducted in Urdu for a Pakistani network. It’s an ironic argument, especially in light of last week’s UN report clearing Israel in the killing of a child in Gaza which the BBC had previously – and incorrectly – blamed on Israel.