Monthly Archives: October 2003

. This “analysis” is by by Barbara Plett – BBC correspondent in Ramallah. The analysis of the analysis is by Robert Hinkley of The Sporadic Chronicle. (The title of this post is by him, too.) Alert readers may notice that that the present BBC text differs from the text Mr Hinkley quotes. For instance, this

“Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in an official state of war, caused by Israel’s occupation and illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.”

Now reads

“Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries have been in a state of war since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.”

I guess that in the several hours between the time Mr Hinkley wrote the piece and when I posted it that stealth editor has been busy again. The second version is an improvement on the first – but it is interesting to have the window into Barbara Plett’s thought that the first inaccurate and tendentious version provides.

From this point on Barbara Plett’s text is in ordinary type and Robert Hinkley’s in italics.

————————

“Syria is, of course, Israel’s enemy. The two countries are still in

an official state of war, caused by Israel’s occupation and illegal

annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.”

This state of war is caused by Israel’s illegal occupation of a

Syrian mountain range. Bad Israel. If only Israel gave Syria its

mountains back everything would be fine. Why, if only Israel had given

the mountains back in, say, 1972 then all those Syrian soldiers

wouldn’t have had to climb over the mountains on Yom Kippur in 1973

and that way Israel could have been pushed into the sea and we

wouldn’t have this ongoing conflict.

“And since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, Israel has

increasingly focused on the Palestinian opposition groups hosted by

Syria. ”

First they’re not “terrorists”, they’re “militants”. Then they’re

not “militants”, they’re “opposition groups”. Opposition. A lot like,

say, the Conservative Party, or the Democratic Party. Conservative

Party, meet Islamic Jihad, your fellow Opposition. The next step will

be for Islamic Jihad to be described as “modernisers”, or perhaps

“progessives”. [Members of the Palestinian Authority _acknowledge_ Syrian support of

Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Walking Bomb Brigade etc…]

“In response to Syria’s anti- war, anti-occupation stance, the US has

demanded that it clean up its act to fit the new regional order – one

that increasingly defines all armed resistance, whether in Iraq or

other occupied Arab territories, as “terrorism.” ”

The US has demanded Syria clean up its act (ie: stop supporting

terror groups, which members of the Palestinian Authority acknowledge

Syria does). How unreasonable. How dare the Americans? Cos it’s not

“terrorism”, it’s “opposition”! The Americans have only done this

because of Syria’s anti-war, anti-occupation stance, and not because

the Americans in any way want to cut off funding and material to

groups which try very hard to kill civilians in large numbers.

“According to diplomatic sources, Damascus also urged the exiled Hamas

and Islamic Jihad leaderships to accept the unilateral Palestinian

ceasefire declared in June.

They did, but the truce has since broken down. ”

Just how much LSD does someone have to have taken to beleive that

Hamas and Islamic Jihad actually observed any cease-fire?

“It is in this climate that Israel has chosen to go on the offensive,

to send what Israel Radio called a clear signal that Damascus must

stop its support of Palestinian “terror groups”.”

Sneer quotes remind us that the so-called terror groups are actually

opposition groups.

Then Rob writes,

Let’s play Sneer Quote Shuffle – take the same article and reposition

sneer quotes:

—–

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that another commenter, Dan Skapol, has taken a critical look at the same Barbara Plett article in the comments to the post below.

A reader* wrote this email on Saturday. He or she included the original version of the story. Since then the story has changed, and it does now include mention of who carried out the mass-murder – nonetheless I think our reader makes some valid points about the first version. And the headline is still as ambiguous as ever:

I spotted this story on the BBC website this afternoon (Saturday). It’s the first section of their report on the latest suicide bombing.

Israel suicide attack kills 18

A suicide bomber has killed at least 18 people and injured up to 50 in an attack at a restaurant in the northern port of Haifa, Israeli police say.

The explosion occurred in the Maxim restaurant near Haifa’s beach promenade on the southern edge of the city.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, which comes on the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday.

“There was a security guard outside but the attacker managed to enter and blow up,” Israeli police chief Shlomo Aharonishky said.

“There was a very big explosion, which blew out the windows. It was horrible,” a witness told Israeli TV.

Three children are reported to be among the dead.

It is the first such attack since 9 September, when 15 people were killed in twin suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Is it just me, or do others also find that headline misleading? Notice too, that the “P” word is missing from this part of the report. I suppose the Beeb cannot bring itself to admit that its Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ heroes could even contemplate harming Jews. Even in the final paragraph, which discusses the back-to-back suicide bombings in August, they omit to mention that they were carried out by Palestinians. With any other organization, I’d attribute this simply to bad journalism. In the case of the BBC, however…..

On a related subject, look at the comments to the previous post for a quick comment on how the BBC dealt with the retaliatory strike.

*Let us know if you want your name used.

This story about Arnie says in passing that he has long supported the “Jewish Lobby Group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The description “Jewish lobby group” caught my eye. Hmm. The description is defensible, but subtly wrong. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has to do with the Jews and it is a lobby group – but actually its mission is a lot more specific than that. What the Center is famous for is Nazi hunting. As the decades go by, true, most of the Nazis have died off, and the organisation is now more concerned with the Jew-killers of 2003 than 1943. That still doesn’t make it just a Jewish lobby group. So far as I know the Center does not lobby for greater recognition of Jewish culture, or for subsidies for Jewish activities, or try to get out the Jewish vote, or do any of the other things that national or racial lobby groups usually do. Nor does it, so far as I can tell, press for any particular US policy with regard to the State of Israel, although it certainly supports Israel. It very specifically concerned with violence and hatred against Jews. I think the BBC no longer feel happy talking about violence against Jews.

How things have changed. Back in 1999 the BBC was much more specific:

“The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, set up in 1977, has pressed for the extradition of numerous war crimes suspects, as well as campaigning for the rights of Holocaust survivors and an end for pensions to SS officers.”

What a difference four years makes! The Wiesenthal boys have now been sent to the lobby doghouse to languish with, obviously, the rest of the sinister Jewish Lobby (a somewhat inflammatory term that the BBC hardly ever used to use), and other low-life such as the gun lobby and the hunting lobby. Joining those sinister lobbyists will be members of various brigades, notably the pro-hunting one already mentioned in the story I linked to, and the blue rinse one. Brigade, being a military word, is even worse than lobby. (In BBC-speak organisations supporting gun-control or favouring a ban on hunting are not lobbies – they are campaigns, a word suggesting mass popular action. The US NRA or the Countryside Alliance can be as massive or popular as they like, they are still usually stuck with being shady old lobbies – though to be fair I have occasionally heard “campaign” used by the Beeb to describe the Countryside Alliance.)

It is instructive to compare this to the BBC’s treatement of the homelessness lobby group Shelter, which back in March and April the BBC used to describe as a “homlessness charity”, but by August is just mentioned by name with no supplementary description at all. What is going on? The BBC is meant to be a worldwide service and usually carefully adds little notes of explanation for its many foreign (or clueless British) readers. No way is Shelter so world-famous that no explanation is needed. What I think has happened is that the BBC has felt one or two blows land home on the subject of its partisan allocation of the terms ‘charity’ and ‘lobby’ group and would rather not lead with its collective chin again. It would be just too painful to call dear old Shelter by that nasty name “lobby group”, though, so the BBC has gone with the old saw that if you can’t say anything nice say nothing.

To forestall criticism that I am just swapping the BBC’s labels, I think there is a meaningful distinction between a charity and a lobby group. If most of the money an organisation goes on giving out help to the afflicted, it’s a charity. If most of it goes on trying to get governments to do things, it’s a lobby group. The SWC is, by this description, a lobby group (but not just a Jewish one). I think Shelter is also a lobby group.

LATER: On reflection, I’m not sure about that last sentence. To be frank I couldn’t find a breakdown of how Shelter spends its money. There isn’t one on the Shelter website, but I get the impression that soup-dispensing is on the way down and politics is on the way up. Nor could I find a chart showing where Shelter’s money came in. Many “charities” nowadays are actually funnels for state money.

UPDATE: Searching BBC news for “gun lobby” I got 10 results. For “anti-gun lobby” I got 1 result. “Hunting lobby” got 47 – and I bet “hunt lobby” would get some more, “anti-hunting lobby” got 5. (Remember to take away 5 from the 47, though.) My searches were quick ‘n’ dirty. I leave it to others to do this more scientifically.

UPDATE: Stealth edit sonar ping! Ben Wald has pointed out in the comments that the Simon Wiesenthal Center is now called a “Jewish human rights group.”

Got this one from the comments to the last post. Tasty Manatees made a few judicious comments about a BBC story on a riot in Iraq. Then he found the story had mysteriously changed… And, as the next commenter points out, the Telegraph’s Beebwatch has reported

another example of a stealth edit.

To some extent I think that stealth edits are a natural result of the explosion of written material put out by the BBC – it’s worth remembering that only a few years ago the BBC’s output was pretty well all either scripted or spontaneous spoken word – and of the fact that writing on the internet can be changed. I bet many an over-hasty newspaperman has wished he could chop and change too. Stealth edits are sometimes better than letting the kiddies’ sillier statements stand; at least it proves that there is someone there with enough grounding in reality to recognise when there might be a problem. But there really ought to be either some convention to mark when and where the edit took place and/or a Error Central page like the readers’ editors pages of some newspapers. Many BBC news stories have a line saying “last updated” at the top, but it’s like those “last checked” charts in supermarket loos: no one seems to actually update the ‘last updated’ signs very often.

This might be a good moment to talk about my own stealth editing policy, which I have just this moment made up. (I don’t know what the other posters think. Contrary to popular belief I am not the boss here.) It’s this. I can stealth edit all I like except when I really want to.

In other words, typos, mis-spellings, grammatical errors, etc. will be corrected without informing you, the readers. Little improvements to the style, ditto. There is a grey area when it comes to making substantial but uncontroversial changes – deleting or adding whole paragraphs; I’d try to mention it but it’s no great sin if I don’t. But if I have made an embarrassing boo-boo I have to admit it.

Yes, that’s actually a more lax policy than I recommend for the BBC. So what? This is a blog. They are the BBC.