Here’s Tony Benn, (nee Viscount Stansgate), the last doughty remnant of the Christian socialists, giving a BBC newsdroid merry hell on the subject of moral cowardice and giving in to Israeli bullying:
He’s right, they’re scared – though I must admit if I had that shrieking Zionist harpy Phillips in my ear every five minutes I’d be scared too. I’d also change my phone number.
Facteiousness aside very little has been made – as yet – of the current BBC Director General, Mark Thompson relationship with the Israeli government or of his 2005 visit to Israel at governmental expense.
This cosying-up to a foreign leadership (and such a politically rabid one as that) is something a BBC DG has never done before, presumably on the grounds that it would compromise BBC impartiality and neutrality.
Of course the cosy tete a tetes he had with Ariel Sharon and sundry other Israeli political notables, those couldn’t possibly affect his impartiality or appear to impute an appearance of impropriety at all, no sir.