ON THE WEEKEND of April 14-15, 2007, delegates from the National Union of Journalists of Great Britain voted to boycott Israeli goods in a viciously-worded motion at their annual delegates' conference in Birmingham. The eminent journalist and MP Michael Gove has resigned from the union as a result. Adding insult to injury, the British media reported in recent days that the union had passed the motion in order to "show solidarity with Palestinian journalists in relation to the kidnap of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston." Did we hear that right?
The NUJ motion against Israel was excerpted in this clip from the Jerusalem Post:
. . . By a vote of 66 to 54, the annual delegates' meeting . . . called for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government." The boycott motion was the third clause of a larger anti-Israel resolution proposed by the union's South Yorkshire branch that condemned Israel's "savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon" last summer and the "slaughter of civilians in Gaza" in recent years.
The motion condemning Israel's "savage" treatment of Palestinian civilians after "the defeat of its army" by Hezbollah passed by an even larger margin than the boycott.
According to the Israeli media, the Daily Telegraph's Washington correspondent, Toby Harnden, characterized the vote as "inane, ineffectual, counterproductive and insulting to the intelligence."
The Jerusalem Post also reported that Yahoo Europe news director Lloyd Shepherd had joked that he now looked "forward to similar boycotts of Saudi oil (for abuse of women and human rights), Turkish desserts (limits to freedom of speech) and, of course, the immediate replacement of all stationery in the NUJ's offices which has been made or assembled in China."
I am a member of the NUJ and have avoided their meetings like the plague for the past four years for two reasons: 1) the tone of the meetings is always aggressively anti-Zionist and anti-American, and when I have been unwell I've found this exacerbated my illness; 2) journalists' work issues are often barely discussed because of the inordinate amount of time devoted to denouncing Israel's apartheid and condemning America's imperialist genocides.
Last week I decided to attend my branch meeting despite feeling under the weather. I was stunned by the motion about Israel and voiced my displeasure. I also raised with the chairman the issue of the anti-American rhetoric that permeates NUJ proceedings and publications but received only a furious rebuke from him about "America bombing the shit out of Afghanistan and Iraq."
At least one member at my NUJ branch observed that the vote had coincided with Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day. And I was touched that the members insisted on taking me out after the meeting and apologizing for the chairman's behavior, but this did not lessen the blow from my union--which is supposed to represent impartiality in the media--passing this reprehensible and ill-informed motion against Israel. The credibility of the NUJ has been irreparably damaged, and the ignorance of the facts on the ground by the union's Chair, Jeremy Dear, is inexcusable. It is a dark day for British journalism.
At this point, it is vital to note coverage by the NUJ magazine, and by the British media in general, of the issue of American friendly fire incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nature of which led True Crime Blog UK to accuse the lot of jumping on the "'let's hate America' bandwagon."
In the True Crime essay, decorated with a Union Jack, the writer provides a comprehensive report on the recent decision by the Oxfordshire coroner ruling the death of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull an unlawful killing, the culprits being the 190th Squadron of the United States Air Force Air National Guard. The event was a tragedy, and, in a video of the strike that was widely shown on American television, one could hear the anguish, tears, and remorse of the pilots, whose commander in the air was Gus Kohntopp, an A-10 Thunderbolt fighter pilot with the Idaho Air National Guard.
What bothers me, and what irks True Crime UK, is the excessive zeal with which the British media have been reporting this story and that of ITN reporter Terry Lloyd, also killed by American forces in the middle of a fierce firefight during the opening days of the invasion.
