When 'fail' means 'score'

By AMANDA RUTH THOMAS
I failed my Journalism MA because my chosen topic was ‘Anti-Semitism in the UK’.
That was in 2003. I re-did it, of course, and passed. I just didn’t get to graduate with my fellows, which was a very small price to pay for revealing the truth.
Why did I fail? Well, I had interviewed a good number of Jewish community leaders about the atmosphere in the country at the time, which was partly due to a twisted backlash as Israel was defending herself (again) during the Second Intifada.  The alleged fundamental flaw in my TV project was a lack of ‘balance’, due to the risk of ‘Islamophobia’. Islamo-what?
And so began the long list of newly invented phobias suffered by the ‘intolerant’, to stop anyone speaking out about just about anything. I’m sure that it’s possible that the university in question invented this particular word. In any case, the notion of Islamophobia almost cost me a very expensive (no subsidies for journalists!) degree.
To avert disaster, I simply added one or two more non-Jewish contributors [I already had a couple] whilst keeping in all my relevant interviewees. I tweaked the film, that’s all. My fatal errors were apparently not fatal.
Twelve years later, the British Jewish community is once more feeling the effects of anti-Zionism, much of which transpires as anti-Semitism. Incidents in 2014 were up by more than double the previous year - admittedly recorded in July during Operation Protective Edge - according to a Metropolitan Police poll. CST figures will be out next month, and, as in 2002-3, they will be scrutinized from all sides.
Even in 2003, I wanted people to be aware of the newly disguised discrimination, referred to in my little package by Dr Paul Iganski, co-author of ‘A New Anti-Semitism?’. Iganski happens not to be Jewish, but also happens to have been the victim of anti-Semitism. Now there's a revelation. It could literally happen to anyone. And he wasn't a hasty add-in; the (now) professor was in from the start!
It’s true that bad feeling follows a pattern of what’s happening in Israel, but what isn’t clear is whether the sentiment is already there under the surface, a latent demon just waiting to rear its ugly head.
So we have an educational media institution guarding against a wholehearted defence of the Jewish community. There was a caveat. I couldn’t just talk about anti-Jewish feeling exclusively, without mentioning other types of racism - or without verification from different religious leaders - as if they would make it up! [You hear it in news reports all the time: “Israel says” such and such has happened, rather than just verify the source and then report it.]
Why was this? Why couldn’t I devote my project, like a documentary, to the plight of one people? Isn’t theirs enough? Hasn’t history told us that this demon needs exposing without placating and plausible excuses?
It would appear, then, that media bias is cultivated long before people qualify in the business. To give you an idea, one of my esteemed tutors assured me that Melanie Phillips was “weird”. No reason, no evidence, nothing. What a very ‘balanced’ statement, which could not be further from the truth!
I once heard Bill Wilson, founder of Metro clubs for street kids, say: “You won’t take action until you’re angry enough about something.” I don’t know about you, but my blood is almost at boiling point at times. If something happens in Israel and then I switch on home news, or listen to the radio, the twist is so subtle, so dangerous, so irresponsible, that I sometimes can’t sleep for anger.
“Be angry and sin not,” reads a verse in the New Testament. Also we read that Yeshua (Jesus) turned the tables in the Temple, filled with righteous anger that the holy place was being desecrated. I find this helpful.  It’s not wrong to be angry; it’s wrong not to act on it.
May a huge army of truth-bearers rise up in Europe to counter the subtle, lukewarm complacency of the kind that allowed the Holocaust to happen. Never Again.


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