Reign Of The Rockets?
April 24, 2008
Unreported world journalist Sam Kiley and director Edward Watts travelled to Gaza to make a documentary which got prime time viewing on Channel 4.
I got the impression they were not experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict as they tended to repeat Israeli Government propaganda without, I think, realising or questioning.
If the title isn’t enough to show a bias (why not reign of Apache Gunships / F-16s?) then this one statement can sum the whole thing up.
“All Gazans suffer because of the rocket attacks on Israel” Sam Kiley
Wittingly or not, Kiley recycles Israeli propaganda on the recent conflict. Theres no reason to say that Israeli oppression is due to Palestinian rocket fire. Israel was shelling Gaza even as Hamas maintained over a year long ceasefire. At best you could say the situation is not clear enough to say which side is retailiating - in fact it makes more sense to say the Palestinians are retailiating. Given that Hamas had a ceasefire before being elected, after which Gaza was then blockaded, a military coup plotted against them and the Strip was shelled by Israel. All this before the rockets began.
He also then fails to point out that collective punishment is illegal under Geneva Conventions - in other words punishing all Gazans due to rocket fire is not justified and is actually a war crime. What he should have said, at the very least, was “all Gazans suffer due to Israeli war crimes [illegal collective punishment] which aren’t justified by rocket attacks.”
With these obvious discrepencies its easy to see why the Glasgow Media Group found that people had a confused understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Hard Times, Desperate Measures
July 13, 2007
The State of Israel seems to be dire straits — it has an image problem. A survey last year revealed Israel as the least popular ‘brand’ in the world. Since then it has launched various programs to improve its image worldwide, each more desperate than the other. Here is a sampling.
Porno PR
Here is what YNet had reported earlier this year:
The Israeli Consulate in New York has come up with an ingenious idea to promote tourism to Israel in the United States: officials there have managed to twist the arms of the most popular US men’s magazine, Maxim, to write a feature about stunning Israeli models…[and] encourage American tourists to come to Israel cashing in on the country’s reputation for being home to some of the world’s most beautiful women.
Maxim editors initially rejected a proposal by the Israeli Consulate to cover the personal stories of famous Israeli models, but when the Consulate sent pictures of 12 carefully selected beauty queens, Maxim was quick to acquiesce…
The magazine is sending a team of three top photographers to Israel for a photo shoot of the models at several locations in the center of Israel…The project includes the production of a video featuring the models which the consulate plans to send to American television broadcasters.
The magazine has since published an issue covering half naked Israeli women soldiers . Even in Israel some thought it was stooping too low, but apparently the Israeli Embassy in the US is not constrained by any such concerns. Here is an image of a formal invitation sent for an event celebrating the publication of the ‘lads-magazine’ at the Israeli embassy.
Enlisting Racist Defenders
Earlier I had mentioned the curious phenomena of neo-nazi’s in Israel’s military (some with swastikas tattooed on their arms), but the real threat Israel has faced has never been physical — it is a political one. Faced with diminishing support in Europe, Israel once again resorts to the familiar tactic of crying ‘anti-Semitism’. According to its defenders, there is not other reason why anyone should find any problem with its brutal occupation, routine murder of children and stragulation of a whole native population. However, the choice for the new assault on Israel’s criticis could not have been more improbable. Chastising the Left for its purported anti-Jewish bigotry is none other than Richard Littlejohn, a man who has built a career on racist rabble-rousing and xenophobic attacks on immigrants. Channel 4, the putatively ‘liberal’ British channel, gets a cretinous bigot to smear critics of Israel, and conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism — and pontificate on ethnic tolerance!
Lets look at Littlejohn’s own record of tolerance.
On Rwanda: “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them”.
On Palestinians: He has also called the Palestinians “the pikeys of the Middle East” and suggested that it was time to “wring [their] necks”. “Pikey” is a racist reference to Gypsies, one of Littlejohn’s pet hates, along with gays and asylum seekers. (Tony Greenstein)
On Lebanon: “Islamonazis are sophisticated propagandists and they know they’ll find a gullible audience in the civilised world for their carefully-strewn teddy bears, strategically-placed ‘Baby Milk Factory’ signs (in English) and wailing widows from central casting…Have you ever noticed how every time a coalition air strike goes astray in Iraq, it always manages to hit a ‘wedding party’? …Why is there only ever one child’s shoe in the rubble, never a pair? There always seems to be a broken medicine box, too, with a handy red cross - never a red crescent, mind you - on the lid, just in case we haven’t got the message…I use a rough rule of thumb whenever I watch television coverage of the Middle East. Anyone who pronounces Hezbollah as ‘Hiz-bull-arrrgh’ and Israeli as ‘Izza-ra-ay-lee’ is almost certainly telling lies.“
On Muslims: “here is a simple cut-out-and-keep guide to the two dominant branches of Islam: Sunnis are the peace-loving, Saudi-backed wing who brought you Al Qaeda. Shias are the peace-loving, Iranian-backed strain behind Hamas and Hezbollah. I hope that helps.”
The man’s personality was best summed up by George Galloway: “Littlejohn is a drivelling guttersnipe who long ago fell out of the gutter into the sewer . . . This man is a moron. This man is a boor. This man is an idiot”.
Iranian Jews
If there is one thing Israel has always done well, it is displacing native populations. Except its new effort to create refugees seems not to have borne fruit. Guardian reports:
Iran’s Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.
The incentives — ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families — were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel from among Iran’s 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel’s official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.
However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as “immature political enticements” and said their national identity was not for sale.
“The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradeable for any amount of money,” the society said in a statement. “Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran’s Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews.”
The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after earlier offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.
Iran’s sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country’s Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty.
“It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money,” he said. “Iran’s Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel.”
Iran’s Jewish population has dwindled from around 80,000 at the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution but remains the largest of any country in the Middle East apart from Israel. Jews have lived in Iran since at least 700BC.
Pilger on Gaza: Imprisoning A Whole Nation
June 3, 2007
I had missed Pilger’s latest article on Gaza, but given the ceaseless brutality inflicted on Gaza decade after decade it, alas, hasn’t lost its relevance.
Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain’s Channel 4 News, were “targeting key militants of Hamas” and the “Hamas infrastructure”. The BBC described a “clash” between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants’ car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the “Hamas infrastructure”, this was the headquarters of the party that won last year’s democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also “clashed” with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
“Some say,” said the Channel 4 reporter, that “Hamas has courted this [attack]…” Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an “endless war”, suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world’s fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, “Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children”.
Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative”, in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas’s rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis’ aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.
With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today…”
On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: “Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show,” he wrote. “In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director… The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is… an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation.”
The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza’s more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the “thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment… The shadows of human beings roam the ruins… They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions”.
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water’s edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who “clashed” with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that “two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper’s wound”. A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them “children of the dust”. Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children’s community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. “The statistic I personally find unbearable,” he said, “is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group’s homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed.”
He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian “martyrs” and even the enemy, “because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships”.
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in “stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises”. Just as the invasion of Iraq was a “war by media”, so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided “conflict” in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term “occupied territories” is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as “terrorism”, “murder” and “savage, cold-blooded killing” describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.
There are honourable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.
A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a “terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction” and one that “refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk”. This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine’s destruction. Moreover, Hamas’s long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. “The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran,” said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. “Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about political solutions… If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don’t think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution].”
When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.
The following exchange highlights the reason why I feel the primary qualification for making it in the mainstream media is for one’s head to be safely plugged up one’s rear.
Letter from George Monbiot to Hamish Mykura, 16th March 2007
Dear Hamish,
I deeply regret your attempt on the Today programme on Wednesday to use my programme for Dispatches as your justification for broadcasting Martin Durkin’s film The Great Global Warming Swindle.
I do so for three reasons.
1. You claimed that both programmes were commissioned as part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”. This is untrue, as I am sure you know. The films were commissioned quite separately, by different departments. The Great Global Warming Swindle must have been commissioned long before my programme. Neither I nor anyone else on the production team has ever been told that my programme was part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”, or that it would be in any way linked to The Great Global Warming Swindle. If I had been aware of this, I would have withdrawn my cooperation. If this claim reflects your general standards of honesty, it might explain how The Great Global Warming Swindle came to be broadcast.
2. I am also resentful of the association between my film and Martin Durkin’s. My film was subjected to a rigorous process of fact-checking. Any claim which would not stand up to rigorous academic scrutiny was dropped. The production team was determined to ensure that every part of the film was robust and unchallengeable, and were supported in this by Channel 4’s current affairs department. Somehow the same standards do not seem to have been applied by your department. Durkin’s film contained a number of fundamental errors, some of which, it seems, could only have been made deliberately. Some of the graphs had plainly been “modified” by the production team. He suggested that the cooling after the Second World War was unexplained by climate scientists, while in truth climate scientists know that it was caused by global dimming as a result of sulphate pollution. As one of the contributers to the programme, Professor Carl Wunsch, has pointed out, the film was “as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two”, while the way it used his remarks “comes close to fraud”. How dare you associate me with this?
3. You suggested that my film in some way “balances” Durkin’s. But my film was not about the science of climate change. It was about the policies arising from it. I was not asked to demonstrate that manmade climate change was taking place. Neither was Mark Dowd, whose film you also cited. I am sure you can tell the difference between a film about science and a film about policy.
I would like to ask you three questions:
A. Could you please give me a list of the programmes about climate change your department has broadcast over the past 10 years.
B. In your letter to the Guardian you state that “we are presenting a range of programmes on the environment, many of which have as their premise the influence of CO2 as a driver of climate change”. Could you please let me know what these programmes are, and whether any of them are devoted to explaining the science of climate change, as understood by the great majority of the world’s scientists?
C. Could you please tell me whether you or any other commissioner in your department possesses a science degree?
Yours Sincerely,
George Monbiot
Letter from Hamish Mykura to George Monbiot, 20th March 2007.
Dear George,
Thank you for this. I’m happy to respond to the points you raise.
Firstly on your general points, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ was indeed commissioned as part of a season of polemical films about climate change. The others were your film and Mark Dowd’s ‘God is Green’. I discussed these films at an early stage with Dorothy Byrne and other colleagues. It is usual for Channel 4’s seasons to originate from different departments, for example our Adoption Season and Bloody Foreigners Season comprised programmes from the News and Current Affairs and Documentaries departments.
‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ was subject to the same legal and editorial scrutiny as your film, which you agree is rigorous.
Carl Wunsch was not misrepresented or misled about the programme and our correpondence with him clearly establishes this.
On your specific questions
1. I do not have a list of climate change programmes covering ten years. However in the last two years Channel 4 transmitted ‘A World Without Water’ on the global scarcity of water supply, ‘The Year the Earth Went Wild’ on increasing climate and geological volatitlity, ‘The End of the World as we Know It’ which was Marcel Theroux’s essay on global warming, ‘Seven Days that Shook the Weathermen’ on the effects of climate change, ‘Britain’s Tornado’ on the increase in volatile weather in the UK, and ‘What would Jesus Drive’ on the debate over US fuel consumption.
2. Channel 4 announced to the press in January that the environment would form the focus of a range of different programmes and series in 2007. As well as the three polemics which deal with climate change, we announced the series ‘Dumped’ – in which participants see how well they can live on the household waste that we throw away every day; the series ‘River Cottage Market’ which addresses the concept of ‘food miles’ and offers practical solutions to using local produce. There was also the series ‘Animal Farm’, which is an investigation of the pros and cons of genetic modification.
3. My own PhD devises mathematical predictive equations to assess soil erosion and environmental impacts of rainforest clearance in the tropics. Regards
Hamish Mykura
Head of History, Science & Religion
Letter from George Monbiot to Hamish Mykura, 22nd March 2007.
Dear Hamish,
thank you for your reply.
On the first point, as this is news to those of us who made my film, I would be grateful if you could provide me with some evidence: some memos or publicity material, for example, which show that it was commissioned as part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”.
On the issue of editorial scrutiny, you are plain wrong. Every fact in my programme stood up to examination, and remains standing today. The film you commissioned, by contrast, was a concatenation of mistakes so evident that some of them could only have been made on purpose. Let me give you some examples:
1. “Volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all the factories and cars and planes and other sources of man-made carbon dioxide put together.”
This is simply wrong, as the most basic fact-check would have established.
2. The closing statement was as follows: “There will still be people who believe that this is the end of the world. Particularly when you have, for example, uh, the chief scientist of the UK telling people that by the end of the century, the only inhabitable place on the Earth, will be the Antarctic and it may, humanity may survive, thanks to some breeding couples, who moved to the Antarctic, I mean this is hilarious, it would be hilarious actually, if, if, if it weren’t so sad.”
These are not the views of the chief scientist, Sir David King. They are the views of James Lovelock. Singer appears to have confused them. Again, even a cursory fact check would have established this.
3. Almost every graph in the film was manipulated. In some cases, the time-line was extended beyond the available data, in others the curve had been smoothed to the extent that it became misleading. It looks as if these instances were deliberate attempts to fit the data to the argument.
4. The credentials of several of the scientists in the film were inflated. The worst example is Tim Ball, who is described as “Professor Tim Ball, Department of Climatology, University of Winnipeg”. As far as I can discover, there is no Department of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg. In fact he was a Professor of Geography at that university from 1988 until he retired in 1996. He has not since held an official position there or at any other university. Nor has he been granted an emeritus professorship.
Then there are the distortions by omission:
5. There is the suggestion, for example, that the standard climate model cannot explain the relative cooling between the 1940s and the 1970s. Any reputable climate scientist could have pointed out that the mechanism – global dimming – is well known and consistent with the models.
6. There is the claim that as rising temperatures, as shown in the Antarctic ice cores, pre-date rises in CO2, CO2 cannot be a driver of climate change. Again, as I suspect both you and Durkin knew perfectly well, this too is explained by the models.
7. There is the deliberate evasion of the question of funding. The film asks the contributers who have NOT received funding from the oil industry whether or not they have, and they reply in the negative. It does not ask Fred Singer, who HAS received such funding. It claims that Pat Michaels came “under attack from climate campaigners” for “conduct[ing] research which was part funded by the coal industry”. In fact, as the most cursory check would have shown, he came under attack for acting as a paid advocate for the coal industry, without declaring his interests. If you want documentary evidence for this, I can send it to you. But, again, your fact checkers – if there were any – should have found it.
Who was the scientific adviser on this film? Who were the fact-checkers? What qualifications did they have?
As for Carl Wunsch, surely he is better placed to decide whether or not he has been misrepresented than you are? Anyone watching the film would have concluded – as I did when I first saw it – that Wunsch subscribed to its thesis that CO2 was not a driver of climate change. Can you tell me that this is not the impression it creates? In other words, what depths of intellectual dishonesty are you prepared to plumb in defending this film?
But the most shocking information in your email is contained in the last line. When I asked whether anyone in your department had a degree in science, I confidently expected that the answer would be no – this might have explained quite a lot. Some of the errors in the film might even have been understandable. But discovering that you have a PhD in maths/environmental science, I realise that you must have gone into this with your eyes open. You know what the scientific process involves. You know what science looks like. You must also know what scientific fraud looks like. You appear to have chosen fraud.
Yours Sincerely, George Monbiot.
Letter from Hamish Mykura to George Monbiot, 26th March 2007.
Dear George,
Thank you for this.
With regard to the points you raise about the content of the programme ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, this film was subject to the same degree of editorial scrutiny as your programme ‘Greenwash’, which you yourself describe as ‘rigorous’. The film was indeed commissioned as one of several polemical films dealing with global warming issues in our season of films on the environment.
You question my decision to commission this film. However ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ represented the views of the significant minority of scientists and commentators who don’t subscribe to the view that anthropogenic CO2 is driving climate change. The very significant debate which the film has started is to be welcomed.
Regards, Hamish Mykura
Letter from George Monbiot to Hamish Mykura, 1st April 2007.
Dear Hamish,
Thank you for your message. I note with regret that you have not answered my questions; indeed that you have simply repeated the assertions made in your previous email, which I have already shown to be incorrect.
I listed seven evident and substantial “mistakes” made by The Great Global Warming Swindle. I could have listed several more. Your claim that it was “subject to the same degree of editorial scrutiny” as my programme, Greenwash, could be substantiated in one of only two ways. The first would be to show that Greenwash was also riddled with wildly misleading claims. I challenge you to name one respect – let alone seven – in which its assertions have been proved wrong.
The second would be to accept that the editorial scrutiny offered by your department is deficient. If it were true that The Great Global Warming Swindle was subject to rigorous scrutiny, then the people responsible for that scrutiny are in the wrong job. As you are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the programme was ready for transmission, that surely includes yourself. How many “mistakes” does a film have to make before you consider that it has NOT been subject to rigorous scrutiny?
I asked you in my last letter to justify your claim that both my film and Martin Durkin’s were commissioned as part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”. You have failed to do so. Why? If your claim were true, the evidence would surely not be hard to come by. Nor would it constitute a state secret. There is surely only one explanation for your failure to support this claim: you are unable to do so because it is untrue. If that is the case, then not only did the film you commissioned mislead its viewers on several substantial points of science, but you misled the listeners to the Today programme about the commissioning process. I will be forwarding our correspondence to the Today programme and asking that a correction be made.
Finally, you state that “the very significant debate which the film has started is to be welcomed”. You give yourself too much credit: the debate about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is happening was not started by the Great Global Warming Swindle. It has been taking place for over 20 years. Your film has indeed started a debate: about whether or not it was fit to be broadcast. I think your failure to provide credible responses to my questions answers that point.
Yours Sincerely,
George Monbiot
