Electronic Intifada’s Inspector Clouseau Moment
January 3, 2012 13:06 by Simon Plosker
Mazal tov to Electronic Intifada for a quite superb piece of investigative journalism, “exposing” the day job of Israeli student Smadar Bakovic.
Smadar recently made news for taking on her anti-Israel professor at the UK’s Warwick University and getting her Masters degree thesis upgraded – an effort which began more than 5 months prior to her employment at MediaCentral, a project of HonestReporting.
According to Electronic Intifada, under the headline of “Exposed: UK university student claiming bias works for project of Israel pressure group“, the Jewish Chronicle:
drew heavily on Bakovic as its source, but portrayed her merely as an Israeli student, without mentioning her MediaCentral affiliation.
Was there any effort made to hide the fact that Ms. Bakovic is an employee of MediaCentral, a project of HonestReporting that provides services for foreign press in Israel? Certainly not.
Despite the best efforts of anti-Israel activists to portray pro-Israel advocacy as some sort of cloak and dagger enterprise in the style of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the reality is really quite benign and transparent.
While Electronic Intifada proudly claims to have “outed” a sinister connection between one student’s successful challenge to anti-Israel academia and HonestReporting, a simple Google search reveals Bakovic’s current employment. Even Inspector Clouseau could have found this information with a minimum of effort.
While we are proud to work with Smadar Bakovic, the facts speak for themselves:
- Smadar’s struggle with Warwick University authorities began in April 2010 at her own instigation and with no connection whatsoever to MediaCentral.
- Smadar finished her dissertation by the end of August 2010 – before she had even started working for MediaCentral.
Note to Electronic Intifada: There is absolutely no connection between Smadar Bakovic’s academic issues and MediaCentral.
That Electronic Intifada believes that it has some sort of scoop that changes the parameters of the story is yet again an example of how so much of its content, like the anti-Israel delegitimization campaign in general, is based on hyperbolic fantasy and demonization.
And just for good measure, Electronic Intifada includes old information about HonestReporting taken from a cached version of our former website as well as a brief bio of me, HR’s Managing Editor, straight from the current HR site, as if my employment record has any connection to Smadar Bakovic’s story.
I’m flattered that EI considers me worthy of mention and I hope that its “investigative journalist” found the HR site an interesting and informative read.
The Smadar Bakovic Story
The Times Higher Education supplement covers the full story:
An Israeli postgraduate student is claiming victory on her dissertation regrade after alleging her supervisor had “anti-Israel” prejudices.
A complaint by Smadar Bakovic, 35, who lives near Jerusalem, was upheld by an academic committee at the University of Warwick.
The complaint arose while Ms Bakovic was studying for a masters degree at the university’s department of politics and international studies in 2010.
She says she became uncomfortable with her tutor Nicola Pratt, assistant professor in international politics of the Middle East, after learning she was among the signatories on a January 2009 letter to the Guardian saying that “Israel must lose” following its “assault on Gaza”.
The letter called for a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Ms Bakovic’s request to switch supervisors in April 2010 was rejected by the department because it was against university policy.
In November 2010, Ms Bakovic was awarded a pass for her dissertation – marked by Dr Pratt and counter-marked by a second academic.
Ms Bakovic decided to appeal the decision and requested a regrade, saying Dr Pratt had commented that she had a tendency to “adopt Israeli/Zionist narratives as though they were uncontested facts”.
This request was denied by the university, but it later relented and offered Ms Bakovic the opportunity to submit a revised dissertation to a different lecturer.
She has now been awarded a distinction and claims the higher grade is evidence for Dr Pratt’s “anti-Zionist” bias against her.
Read more here.
More coverage of the issue can be found in:
Image: CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/jbcurio.
juanita
6:29 pm
Jan 03, 2012
Sometimes this kind of research actually has nasty repercussions. For starters, those who want to believe the thesis that there is a Jewish-Israel cabal will believe it, just as we who believe Honest Reporting will believe it. That belief will help cement this dangerous thinking. An example of how this kind of reporting hurt is when Electronic Intifada got itself on the CAMERA mailing list when CAMERA members decided to do “honest reporting” on Wikipedia. They then had the names of everyone and participated in the email list, and all of those who had been participants were banned from editing Wikipedia due to rules about “collusion”. In fact, I would much encourage Honest Reporting members to join Wikipedia and learn to edit it, There is so very much disinformation on Wikipedia, and honest reporters are very much in the minority.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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Rafi Manory
11:46 pm
Jan 03, 2012
I have been doing exactly that for years.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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spostol
5:12 am
Jan 04, 2012
I have no idea what this is all about.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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phili
11:52 am
Jan 04, 2012
Just goes to show how far anti-Semitism has extended (and is extending) in Great Britain.
Come on now – Yeshua was, and is, a Jew!
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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Asher Garber
6:40 pm
Jan 04, 2012
The Electronic Intifada have outed themselves as pissants of journalism, where libelous screeds of Apartheid pepper their dreams for worldwide recognition. Everything about the Electronic Intifada– from their name, to their published drek– is an utter joke.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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Brent Pudsey
5:39 am
Jan 05, 2012
This is an important issue that is raised about the credibility of the press in the issue of the treatment of Israel.
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Nigel
9:54 am
Jan 06, 2012
“Ms Bakovic was awarded a pass for her dissertation – marked by Dr Pratt [her tutor/supervisor] and counter-marked by a second academic.” It is news to me that one’s thesis supervisor marks one’s thesis at any university, let alone a university that is supposed to be one of the top university’s in the UK. Usually, there are at least two external markers. However, from personal experience, it could have been worse, as Dr Pratt could have failed her, or hindered her efforts to the point of not being able to complete her thesis. The University/postgraduate committee/supervisor could have also declined to permit her thesis topic and forced her to undertake another topic, as a means to hinder/prevent the completion of her degree. In my experience, open bias against Jews and Israel is growing in academia. And if the bias cannot rightly be argued, there will almost certainly be fear of Jews undertaking Israel-themed research that will likely argue pro-Israel views or anti-Israel bias. I have concluded that there’s a reason most Jews focus their higher education in the traditional professions, rather than the likes of humanities/social sciences, because the latter departments can make it extremely difficult/uncomfortable for Jews and ‘justify’ doing so to the point of effectively preventing completion by those Jews who refuse to knuckle-under to the biases of the academic staff.departments/etc. When I first attended university, one could still get good marks even if strongly disagreeing with the marker’s opinions, as long as one presented a well-written/argued/researched paper. Today, it is very unlikely that you can get away with significant deviations from the marker’s opinions/biases. Unless you are a self-hating Jew, the safest academic routes for Jews likely remain the likes of medicine, sciences, accountancy, business, engineering, planning, architecture, and maybe law.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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buxton
11:31 am
Jan 09, 2012
I have seen so much bias against anyone who doesn’t follow the party line at Universities that people have lost their jobs and had papers refused to be published because they have prooved the accepted theories wrong. e.g. Evolution v Intelligent design (see Ben Stein’s video “Expelled, no intelligence allowed”) I know he’s a Jew too.
If you differ from the authorities, then you will find it hard to get a pass unless you are a distinction student and know more about the failures of their theories than they do themselves. You will be demonised and called all kinds of names, while a calm objective discussion on the facts will never occur.
Uni professors are not doing it for the money or the power, its their pride and the praise of others that motivates them and so attacking their loved theories is attacking their ability to discern between believing in what suits them and their prejudices and sticking to the facts as they should. It shows everybody that they should be sacked!
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