Gaza.

Conservative Plagerists for Israel: Exposed

The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFoI) has a fearsome reputation in UK politics. Those of us who make a habit of being informed about this group are constantly being given the impression that this is a well funded and organised group not to be taken lightly.

Imagine our surprise, then, when something in particular struck us as odd with the current ‘Weekly Briefing’ of  Conservative Friends of Israel, and upon further investigation (thanks Google!) we found that far from being a heavyweight analysis of current events, it is in fact a hotch-potch of (badly) copied-and-pasted stories from other high-profile news outlets.

We understand that trawling through a wide range of sources to get as much information as possible is difficult and takes time and effort but we think it results in quality analysis. We make an absolute point of citing original sources both out of academic and professional courtesy. Conservative Friends of Israel appear not to follow this basic premise. Instead, they offer a facade of professionalism which does not live up to expectations.

To the evidence, then. Click here for a screenshot of the CFoI Weekly Briefing page in question - this screenshot was taken on 9 August 2010. (Hint - if it looks small in your browser, click the image, it should get bigger).

The pattern of the Weekly Briefing appears to be that whoever within the Conservative Friends of Israel copied and paste the text from elsewhere broke each paragraph of the original text into a bullet point for their own briefing. There is some editing of the original text, but clearly not enough if other people can find the original stories on the web within a few minutes of searching.

The current Weekly Briefing has a number of story headings and the list below breaks down where the text for each story under these headings was stolen from.

• New EU Sanctions > Haaretz
• US Blacklists 21 state owned Iranian companies > The Wall Street Journal
• Further sanctions in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp > The Wall Street Journal
• Sanctions begin to take effect > Business Week
• Obama open to Iran engagement > The Washington Post
• Rocket attacks on Israel and Jordan > The Christian Science Monitor (page 1 of 2 page article)
• How Hamas could use the Sinai to attack Israel? [sic] > The Christian Science Monitor (page 2 of 2 page article)
• Violence at the Israel /Lebanon border > Honest Reporting / The Jerusalem Post (1) / The Jerusalem Post (2) / The Jerusalam Post (3)
• Israel to Participate in UN Flotilla Enquiry > Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

We would hazard a guess that the person pulling together all this briefing material on behalf of Conservative Friends of Israel is either not a native speaker of English (the few giveaway clues that there are on this made us look into the provenance of the material that CFoI is claiming as its own), or else they lack the basic skills required to compile and edit a Weekly Briefing.

Admittedly, it is a tall order to condense a whole week of news about Israel into a number of bullet points, but what an organisation like CFoI should not be doing is stealing the work of others in order to compensate for their own shortcomings.

Apart from the delicious irony of discovering that Conservative Friends of Israel plagiarised an article from an organisation called ‘Honest Reporting’, we noticed with disappointment that whilst plagiarising a Haaretz article the Conservative Friends of Israel deliberately and mendaciously missed out the start of that article which details a letter that shows “Iran’s complete readiness to hold negotiations over the fuel for the Tehran reactor without any conditions.”

Why are Conservative Friends of Israel actively seeking to suppress the willingness of Iran to negotiate? Israel, according to the original article, welcomes the attempt at diplomacy, why was this fact, one of the main points of the article which Conservative Friends of Israel plagiarised, ignored and not passed on in the Conservative Friends of Israel briefing?

Why does this even matter?

Well, we think it demonstrates that Conservative Friends of Israel, far from being an all-powerful organisation with deep pockets and members prone to and thoughtful and insightful analysis, appear to be a shallow unimaginative lot who resort to using the work of others in order to puff up the reputation of their organisation.

Not only stealing from others, but wilfully misrepresenting the intentions of Iran in terms of negotiation is a most sinister manifestation of Israeli state propaganda and misdirection. Do members of Conservative Friends of Israel know that the people running that organisation are deliberately misinforming them or simply regurgitating press releases from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We were going to monitor the Conservative Friends of Israel ‘Weekly Briefings’ for a few more weeks, but the evidence for this week alone is irrefutable. Wonder what would happen if we went back through past ‘briefings’?  It is not necessarily wrong to condense other people’s work, but it is wrong to present it as if it were your own with no recognition for the original authors.

Will the next Weekly Briefing from Conservative Friends of Israel contain wholesale stolen material from other organisations, or will they be able to muster up some original content? Perhaps it might be an idea issue an explanation and an apology to all the organisations content was stolen from?

New Foreign Secretary for the UK

William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary for the UK can expect a call from Israel very soon, if not already.  Why?  Well, courtesy of Conservative Friends of Israel, let us find out what Hague thinks of Israel.

“As a longstanding friend of Israel and someone who joined CFI at the age of 15, my position is that there must be a two state solution. It is in the interest of Israel to secure a viable Palestinian State.

A conservative government would not say we should remove the threat of military action. This option should remain on the table. But I’m not calling for it at the moment… The entire issue needs very careful consideration, because it is hard to see how military action even if it was successful in the short term will resolve the problem in the long term… We have to do everything we can to avoid Iran getting a nuclear weapon… It is important to intensify peaceful pressure on Iran.

David Miliband and I differ on the urgency of the Universal Jurisdiction question. He said in December when Tzipi Livni didn’t feel able to visit Britain that it was an urgent matter. Well it was so urgent that we’ve now reached the end of March and there are no government proposals to do anything about it other than an article the Prime Minister wrote in the Daily Telegraph which was really an announcement that they were not going to do anything about it. And one labour MP promoted a Bill to deal with the matter which he knows full well has no chance of being debated let alone being enacted at this stage of the Parliament.

I think we’d have acted more speedily over this and we will be looking to act speedily if we are elected because it is intolerable that Israeli politicians feel they cannot come to Britain to discuss with us all of these issues. So this is one of the main differences between us and the Government.

We also differed over how to vote on the Goldstone Report when it turned out they couldn’t even abstain competently… The motion that went forward was unbalanced as it made no mention of the responsibility of Hamas. We would have voted against it.