Professor Richard Falk (international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years; since 2002 in Santa Barbara, California, University of California in Global and International Studies; since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestine) on censorship by the BBC (2014): “ Needless to say, the phone lines have been quiet since each of these [BBC] ‘dumping’ incidents. I wonder why this pattern of [BBC] invitation and cancellation. I am quite sure that these were quite separate programming for each of the invitations with no coordination among them. Was there some master censor at the BBC that reviewed the guest list just prior to the scheduled broadcast, somewhat in the manner that the way an ethical submarine commander might review the manifest of an enemy passenger ship in time of war? Perhaps, BBC was rightly concerned that there might be a faint and ugly stain of balance that would tarnish their unsullied reputation of pro-Israeli partisanship. I will probably be forever reliant on such conjectures. I feel self-conscious relating this little saga at a time when so many in Gaza are dying and bleeding, and all are grieving. As I write I feel humble, not arrogant. It seems that somewhere buried in these trivial rejections there is occasion for concern that the media claim of objectivity in liberal societies is above all else a sham. That even powerful players such as BBC are secretly captive, and its reportage and commentary qualifies less as news than as Hasbara*, at least when it comes to Israel-Palestine” ) (see Richard Falk, “When BBC calls don’t answer”, Countercurrents, 26 July 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/falk260714.htm ).
* Hebrew: “explanation” but euphemism for Apartheid Israeli and Zionist “propaganda”.
Richard Falk (anti-racist Jewish American progressive writer and emeritus professor of international law at 41-Nobel-laureate Princeton University): “[The] American thirst for victory, his scorn for defeat, gives the militarist line great leverage over political debate, although its degree of dominance ebbs and flow with the nature of the issue and the public mood, the latter itself significantly shaped by a media that defers to the state on national security policy in most matters” (quoted in Harry Kawilarang, “Quotations on Terrorism”, Trafford Publishing, UK, 2006).