British journalists' union accepts Palestinian bribe

No, it wasn't a money bribe. The old Humbert Wolfe adage still holds true:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God) the British journalist

But seeing what the man will due unbribed, there's no occasion to.

According to a correspondent of Malachi's, Tim Gopsill, the editor of The Journalist, the house journal of the National Union of Journalists, told him in a phone call that the reason the union passed its entirely one-sided motion, committing itself to boycotting Israeli goods, was to reward the Palestinian Journalists' Union for co-operating with its campaign on behalf of kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston.

Is there any evidence for this? Here's a pointer:

Here, on the NUJ web site, you can download a March 2007 press release from the Palestinian Journalists' Union (an organization which is controlled by Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah). It includes this statement:

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate praises the great role of the British journalists and their union ‘ the British Journalists Union and its officials for their support of the Palestinian cause ,people and the Palestinian journalists .

But to be fair to the PUJ, they, unlike the NUJ, did also call for a three day boycott of the Palestinian Presidency and government offices for their failure to do enough to help free Johnston. Laughably, their press release hints at shadowy figures who are behind the kidnapping, and condemns the practice as harming the Palestinian cause. They've clearly not picked up on the line of their own affiliated party, Fatah, that kidnapping Israeli soldiers and civilians is a laudable way of forwarding the cause of releasing convicted Palestinian terrorists. Or perhaps they are only against kidnapping people who aren't Israelis. Hopefully, someone will check that out with them.

It's fascinating that the NUJ is prepared to host on its web site a statement from an overseas union that openly acknowledges its partisanship on behalf of their particular political cause. So much for journalistic integrity on the NUJ's part.

HAT TIP: Malachi

UPDATE: Venichka at Harry's Place has a stunning post which carries an official NUJ statement (with a link to download it), acknowledging that it did indeed pass the boycott motion as a quid pro quo to the Palestinian Journalists motion. It makes quite toe-curling attempts to justify what it's done:

Among the motions passed in the international debate was one calling among other things for the NUJ to support a “boycott of Israeli goods… led by trade unions and the TUC” in response to the situation in Palestine and last year’s conflict in Lebanon.

The call for the boycott in part related it to the kidnap of Alan Johnston. The Palestinian journalists union has given huge support to the campaign for his release - holding demonstrations and strikes against the Palestinian authority to demand more action from them. We work closely with the Palestinian union through the International Federation of Journalists and the boycott call was a gesture of support for the Palestinian people - notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting.

The boycott call has nothing to do with reporting. The NUJ is not telling members how to report Israel - beyond its permanent injunctions to members to report independently and fairly on all matters, and not to produce racist or discriminatory copy. The union has not and never would adopt a line on how any issue should be reported. We stand for free reporting and free speech – and we criticise those, including the Palestinian and Israeli authorities, when they act against journalists' freedom to report.

It was pointed out in the debate that the year-long boycott of the Palestinian authority by the UK, the US and the European Union, not to mention the government of Israel, has led to a surge in the numbers of people who are unemployed, sick and dying because of the cessation of aid payments and revenue to the Palestinian authorities. This is a boycott of a democratically elected government.

The decision made by elected representatives at our conference was a decision of NUJ members as trade unionists and as citizens to try to help put pressure on the Israeli government to reverse its block of these payments, its refusal to recognise Palestinian journalists carrying the international press card and the general damage being done by the continued occupation.

Pathetic. It's not quite appropriate to call it Stalinist or Orwellian, because both of those terms imply a sort of enclosed propagandistic self-confidence rather than the shiftily self-justifying tone of this statement. But there certainly seems to be no end of doublethink in the air.

By the way, I can't recall the NUJ passing any motions condemning the well documented track record of the Palestinian Authority and the factions that run it in systematically terrorising and intimidating Palestinian journalists who try to tell a story that's out of step with the propagandistic mouthings of the PUJ quoted above.

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