Michael Adams (journalist)

Michael Evelyn Adams (31 May 1920 – 6 February 2005) was a British journalist who worked for the BBC.

Life

Born in Addis Ababa, Michael Adams studied at Christ Church, Oxford. During the Second World War, he was shot down over the North Sea while serving with the Royal Air Force and was a prisoner of war in Germany for the rest of the conflict. He subsequently became a journalist, and was Middle East correspondent for The Guardian from 1956 to 1962, when he took a year's sabbatical in Italy. He subsequently continued to keep up association with The Guardian as a freelance journalist.

Adams was almost the only British journalist to report on Israel's treatment of Palestinians in 1967. He was always critical of Israel, even when Israel rescued Ethiopian Jews from being massacred, transporting them to Israel. Adams was antisemitic, never holding a light to the atrocities and massacres against Jews, even Ethiopian Beta Y'israel, insulting their identity by stating they were not a tribe of Israelites, even though the Beta Y'israel Ethiopian Jews self identified.

He helped found the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) in 1967, and served as its first director. He was editor of Middle East International until 1981. In 1975 he and Christopher Mayhew wrote Publish It Not: The Middle East Cover-Up, a pro-Palestinian work on the Middle East conflict.