Belgium: The obsessive Belgian anti-Israel bias

Our readers should be aware that Joël Kotek is one of the leaders of the Israel-bashing organisation CCLJ.  Joël Kotek wrote in 2004 a scathing report, published by the French CRIF, on anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism - things have deteriorated since and the coments are the same. It would be interesting to find out why all anti-anti-semitism campaigns have failed.  For instance, there was a festival at the Brussels Jewish museum, where a massacre took place a year ago, and two of the guests were Israel-bashers and pro-BDS, Anya Topolsky and Nadia Fadil - Joël Kotek was a speaker at the festival...  It has also to be noted that Jewish organisations are at loggerheads with one another - it defenitely doesn't help.

Manfred Gerstenfeld interviews Joël Kotek @ Arutz Sheva

“The obsessive Belgian anti-Israelism originates from three easily identifiable factors, as I pointed out years ago.

The first one combines the Christian anti-Semitic belief with the progressive tradition which identifies ‘the Jewish spirit’ with capitalism.  A second factor is the neurotic memory of the Shoah and its associated feelings of guilt. This is prevalent in Flanders due to their major war-time collaboration with the German occupiers.  A third factor is the anti-Semitism imported with the Muslim immigration. To obtain the votes of these newcomers and their descendants, Belgian politicians accommodate them by promoting anti-Israel policies.

"Anti-Zionism has become a civil religion in Belgium. Its credo is that the Palestinians are always right and that the Israelis are always wrong. Its bible could read that everything that happens in the Middle East is the fault of Israel.”

Prof. Joël Kotek, a political scientist, teaches at the Free University of Brussels and at Sciences Po in Paris, France’s leading university of Social Sciences. The Coordination Committee of the Belgian Jewish Organizations (CCOJB) recently published his analysis of how Israel is portrayed in the French-speaking Belgian media.[1]

“Society’s anti-Zionism is reinforced in the media by additional factors. The correspondents in Israel of the French-speaking Belgian press are only paid if their articles are published. So why should they waste their time and energy writing about positive events, such as an Israeli scientific discovery? The article will be rejected by the editors and they will not receive any payment. 

“The media’s treatment of Israel’s 2014 Protective Edge Campaign has once again proven its bias. The Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are presented by many reporters as attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians – and children in particular -- by bloodthirsty Israeli soldiers.

“One among many examples of major bias was a broadcast of August 4, 2014, by RBTF, the public television station of French speaking Belgium. It began by showing the dead bodies of Palestinian children. Thereafter it presented, out of context, unrelated pictures of Israeli soldiers singing and dancing.  “This is propaganda using an old cinema trick of editing pictures and creating new meaning by placing unrelated frames in sequence. This is known as the Kuleshov effect, after the Soviet Russian moviemaker Lev Kuleshov, whose work became known at the beginning of the twentieth century.

“However, when these same media report about some of the (real) mass murders taking place elsewhere in the Middle East, their approach is always ‘chaste’ and ‘responsible.’ The frequent murders of Muslims by other Muslims are cleaned up and sanitized. The media show air bombardments or combat scenes, but rarely any victims, be they combatants or civilians. One might define it as ‘Muslim barbarianism remains blurred’.

“The excessive media attention given to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been researched by Belgian communications expert Professor Marc Lits. He found that in 2002, the RTBF and another French speaking station, RTL-TV1, devoted 24% of their news broadcasts to the Middle East. No other region of the world reached even 10%. Within the Middle East region, reports on Israel represented almost 88%, thus many times the amount of all other Middle East countries put together. Israel alone thus represented more than 20% of all the stations’ newscasts. More.