I only ask because the BBC have reported ‘clashes’ between rival Palestinian ‘students’. Obviously the Beeb had checked out their enrollment details, or perhaps one could say it’s obvious they were just undertaking a practical module. The fact that the BBC describe the violence thus:
‘throwing stones and homemade explosives and exchanging gunfire’
suggests that it couldn’t really have been a harder term for the poor undergrads.
They then say, of the two main terrorist organisations in the area:
‘they were ordering their followers to bring the tension to an end and that a committee would be formed to resolve any future problems.’
Why such mealy-mouthedness, Beebies? What’s with this ‘tension’ involving explosions and firefights? You were only too happy to host a debate about civil war in Iraq.
There are so many questions unanswered by this report it’s really hard to call it a news report. Here’s my sample:
1)What sense is there in calling the masked (presumably, if the picture alongside means anything) partakers of violence ‘students’. Was it just the locality of the violence? The picture attached, by the way, seems distinctly unhelpful in supporting the sense of describing them as ‘students’.
2) What kind of ‘hurt’ was suffered by the victims of this violence involving bullets and explosives? Did they all just shoot to miss? This point relates to my general body count scepticism, since reports of deaths strongly influence the news agenda.
3)How can the Beeb call violence involving guns and bombs ‘tension’? Is there simply ‘tension’ in Iraq then? Can it be reasonable to view a gun battle as revealing how ‘suspicious’ one side is of another? Alan Johnston also describes the potential for future similar ‘friction’.
4)I notice at the end of the article that it is reported that 15 had been wounded. My point about the nature of their injuries, and whether any- or who knows, many?- of them led to fatalities, still stands, but I read at the beginning of the article about how ‘several people have been hurt’. I do not consider the two statements to be compatible, and the intro is therefore misleading and wrong.
5) Just what is a ‘shadow security force’?
It seems to me the BBC are in a twist over their reporting of the situation among the Palestinians. The fact is that civil war and ongoing violence would be a much more effective description of the Palestinian situation than it would of Iraq. The BBC have got their descriptors mixed up (deliberately and accidentally, I would say, in some ratio or other), and the result is reporting stasis where their journalism means almost nothing.