According to the Irish Times’ article on the controversial comments recently made by Col. Desmond Travers, the Irish member of the UN’s Goldstone Gaza inquiry, “he implied that British foreign policy interests in the Middle East seemed to be strongly influenced by Jewish lobbyists.”
Only “implied”? Here is the actual quote from Travers’ rabidly anti-Israel interview with Middle East Monitor: “Britain’s foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists.” For some reason, the Irish Times took pains to make Travers sound less strident and more reasonable.
In the same interview, Travers also dismissed British Col. Tim Collins’s BBC-broadcast findings—about weapons hidden in Gaza mosques—as “drivel.” This co-author of the Goldstone Report equally dismissed “all” Israeli photographic evidence of such weapons caches as “spurious in the extreme!”
It is bad enough when yet another of the Goldstone investigators, supposed to be impartial, reveals himself to be irredeemably biased against Israel.
It’s worse when this bias is covered up. Just like its coverage of last summer’s controversy over Obama’s award to Mary Robinson—the former Irish president and UN organizer of the 2001 Durban hatefest—the Irish Times once again rallies in knee-jerk fashion to the side of any Irish citizen applying an imbalanced approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
