[wvns] UK Reporters Union Boycott Israel
UK reporters union to boycott Israel
By GEORGE CONGER, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT LONDON
Apr. 14, 2007
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1176152792457&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Talkbacks for this article: 200
Britain's National Union of Journalists denounced Israel on Friday for
its "military adventures" in Gaza and Lebanon, called on the
government to impose sanctions and urged a boycott of Israeli goods.
By a vote of 66 to 54, the annual delegate's meeting of Britain's
largest trade union for journalists called for "a boycott of Israeli
goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid
South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union
Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British
government."
Some of the union's 40,000 members decried its "trendy lefty" agenda.
Other motions before the four-day meeting in Birmingham, which ends
Sunday, included condemnations of the US detention center in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and support for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.
Irish artists' call for Israel boycott mocked
The second Lebanon war: JPost.com special report
The boycott motion was the third clause of a larger anti-Israel
resolution proposed by the union's South Yorkshire branch that
condemned Israel's "savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon" last summer
and the "slaughter of civilians in Gaza" in recent years.
Motion 38 also called for supporting the NGOs Jews for Justice, the
Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and the Council for the Advancement of
British-Arab Understanding.
After an hour of debate, a motion to sever the boycott clause from the
condemnation motion was adopted. The motion condemning Israel's
"savage" behavior toward Palestinian civilians in the wake of "the
defeat of its army" by Hizbullah passed by a wide margin.
Following two abortive hand counts, the boycott motion passed by 66 to
54.
The Daily Telegraph's Washington correspondent, Toby Harnden,
characterized the vote as "inane, ineffectual, counterproductive and
insulting to the intelligence."
"Why should my dues be spent on anti-Israel posturing of which I and
many other members want no part?" Harnden wrote on his Telegraph blog,
condemning the motion as "tendentious and politically-loaded
propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written
in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness."
Craig McGinty, a freelance journalist and member of the Union of
Journalists asked on his blog, "How boycotting any nation's goods,
whether it's Israel, China or Umpah Lumpah Land will help improve the
lot of both staff and freelance journalists."
Former Guardian reporter and Yahoo Europe news director Lloyd Shepherd
quipped that he now looked "forward to similar boycotts of Saudi oil
(abuse of women and human rights), Turkish desserts (limits to freedom
of speech) and, of course, the immediate replacement of all stationery
in the NUJ's offices which has been made or assembled in China."
On the same day the National Union of Journalists condemned Israel,
the organization's international affiliate, the International
Federation of Journalists, called on the Palestinian Authority to
secure the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was
kidnapped five weeks ago by Palestinian gunmen in Gaza.
IFJ general-secretary Aidan White urged the "Palestinian government to
do everything in its power to make sure [Johnston] is released
immediately."
The kidnapping had done "great harm not just to journalism but to the
development of the region in general by making it impossible for
journalists to work safely and report on developments there," he said.
Johnston's kidnapping was not on the NUJ's agenda.
*********************************************************************
WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE
To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
NEWS ARCHIVE IS OPEN TO PUBLIC VIEW
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
Need some good karma? Appreciate the service?
Please consider donating to WVNS today.
Email ummyakoub@yahoo.com for instructions.
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wvns-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:wvns-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:wvns-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wvns-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
No comments:
Post a Comment