RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an interesting development at the militantly anti-Zionist London Review of Books (LRB), the magazine is no longer to receive funding from the UK Arts Council’s regular donor programme. This follows years of campaigning by a variety of individuals and organisations, most notably in the last couple of years by the media monitoring watchdog Just Journalism, who have berated the Arts Council for channeling public funds into an agenda driven media outlet.

I spoke to the LRB, which denied that its anti-Zionist agenda had had anything to do with it: “The Arts Council never raised this as a subject,” said Nicholas Spice from LRB, claiming that the reason LRB was no longer going to get public funds in the manner it had previously obtained them was simply because they had decided not to apply for them. Hmmm. That would be very strange indeed since Spice acknowledged that LRB was loss making!

Why a loss making venture would cease to apply for state subsidy of its own volition is totally beyond me. Spice said that LRB would now be applying for grants through a different route and confirmed that the magazine had been awarded a 10,000 pound grant from the Arts Council for a literary festival in the summer. But that is a subsidy for a festival, not for the magazine as such. In any case, LRB has regularly received grants of over 20,000 pounds in recent years. Why accept half of what you usually get when you’re still making a loss?

Here’s my take on this. The following facts are not in dispute: 1) From 2012 the Arts Council will cease funding a virulently anti-Israeli magazine which since 1980 has received 767,000 pounds in state subsidy via its standard donor programme. 2) The magazine makes a loss. 3) Money that LRB can still get from the Arts Council will next year go to funding a literary festival not the magazine itself. 4) Just Journalism put out a very widely read report on LRB’s anti-Zionism in November 2010 pointing out that “between 2000 and 2010, public money, to the tune of over £188,000, was drawn from to pay for 92 articles on Israel-Palestine, 91 of which put forward a staunchly pro-Palestinian narrative and many of which depicted Israel as, ‘a bloodthirsty and genocidal regime out of all proportion to reality, while sympathetic portraits abounded of groups designated as terrorist organisations by the British government such as Hamas and Hezbollah”. 5) From 2012, LRB will no longer have money from the Arts Council to pay for such articles.

Yes, yes, yes. It’s impossible to prove causality here. But since it is hardly likely that LRB, or indeed any such organisation in a similar situation, would own up to having had its subsidy cut for political bias, it is reasonable to employ our powers of intuition as to what is the most plausible explanation for all this.

In any event, this is certainly a day to celebrate. The British magazine that was the first outlet in the world to publish the notorious Mearsheimer and Walt conspiracy theory about the “Jewish lobby’s” alleged stranglehold over US foreign policy will no longer have public money to pay people to write such articles in the future.