“Violence before diplomacy in Gaza”, says the BBC.
Violence moves faster than negotiation. Now that Israel has its tanks in Gaza, military force will drown out everything else until Prime Minister Ehud Olmert decides that his business there is done.
“Now that Israel has its tanks in Gaza…” Everything was just peachy before? Two Israeli soldiers were killed and one was kidnapped in a totally non-violent manner?
Standard stuff. But this next bit is just so weird.
Palestinians feel very uncomfortable about splits, and are always conscious of the pressure and power radiating from Israel.
Palestinians, you see, are like Counsellor Troi, only not with that dress.
Captain, I sense a great mass of … Israelis – the pressure – the power, radiating out – I can’t bear it…
Something I found regarding JB from 2003:
double-standard was also evident in the run-up to the 2002 festive season when Jeremy Bowen, the former BBC’s Middle East correspondent no less, presented a major documentary which examined the role of God in the biblical Moses story, no less. While Bowen was able to find scientific and historic corroboration for the event, the possibility of divine intervention was discounted. The biblical account of Moses and the Exodus was a “fanciful tale. . . the stuff of fairy tales”.
But the subtext of the documentary revealed an agenda that transcended pure inquiry into the origin of the Jews: “If the Hebrews never were in Egypt,” Bowen intoned, “then perhaps the whole epic was a fiction, made up to give the Jewish people a history and a destiny.” And while scientific evidence was found to explain the miracles that presaged the Exodus, the critical “burning bush” encounter of Moses and God – what Bowen described as “the religious justification for the State of Israel” – was airily dismissed as a matter of faith.
I have no problem with a documentary that proposes scientific explanations for seemingly miraculous events, but I do object when I suspect that the purpose of the investigation is to delegitimise the fundamental basis of Judaism and undermine the claim of the Jewish people to national expression in its ancestral home. Once again, it is inconceivable that the BBC would devote an hour-long, prime-time documentary to a critical investigation that served to delegitimise the Prophet Muhammed and undermine the basic tenets of Islam.
And this is the man whose role is to be “enhanced”.
(BTW, Natalie, thanks for elevating my comment to the main site :0 )
Ever notice that there are no Muslims in Star Trek?
Israeli soldier “taken prisoner”:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5124872.stm
Presumably he’ll get visits by the International Red Cross under the Geneva Convention.
.
Palestinian Authority political leaders
advocated kidnapping-for-hostage policy.
The Palestinian Authority political leadership has been attempting to distance itself from the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Yesterday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas instructed PA Prime Minister Haniyeh and Interior Minister Saed Siam to “guarantee the release of the abducted soldier.” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 27, 2006]
However, one must question the sincerity of such public displays, especially by the Hamas leadership. A review of policy articulated by Hamas political leaders, including Interior Minister Siam himself and the PA Foreign Minister, shows that it was the avowed policy of the Hamas political leadership to kidnap Israeli soldiers as hostages to exchange for terrorists.
More here – http://www.pmw.org.il/
Hamas know exactly where Gilad Shalit is! Bowen didn’t seem to think they did in his little chat earlier!
“Ever notice that there are no Muslims in Star Trek?”
That’s because it’s set in the future.
Has anyone asked whether hamas killing the captured Israeli is a war crime?
the avowed policy of the Hamas political leadership to kidnap Israeli soldiers as hostages to exchange for terrorists.
That would be supported by Paxman’s desperate interview with a Hamas leader on last night’s Newsnight.
After Paxman (nearly) got it into his misguided head that Hamas had no intention of recognising Israel, he turned to the release of the Israeli soldier. The Hamas man beat about the bush, but he appeared to support the policy of blackmail to obtain the release of Hamas people held by the Israelis, rather than seek to secure the unconditional release of the Israeli.
Yes, a very odd way of putting it, even for the Beeb. Had the Palistinians only been left in peace we would not be having this unpleasantness.
Scuse me, –Palestinians– that’s how it’s spelled.
PJF:
I noticed that – the BBC is refering to his ‘capture’ by ‘militants’, not his kidnapping by terrorists. More appeasement from our favourite dhimmis.
Rob, World Have Your Say on Ye Olde BBC World Service Steam Radio described him as “being in the custody of militants” no less!
Meanwhile more boiler-plate angst and woe:
High price of Palestinian struggle
By Roger Hardy
Middle East analyst, BBC News
[Image caption – Palestinians have suffered economically since Hamas’ election]
Many observers are puzzled by the mood of defiance and fatalism among the Palestinians amid the latest crisis in their relationship with Israel.
Many Palestinians sense they have nothing to lose.
Suffering is nothing new to the Palestinians, especially in the crowded, impoverished towns and refugee camps of the Gaza Strip.
They have grown used to economic hardship – and to Israeli retaliation following some act of violence by a militant group.
By and large, they have lost faith in the ability of their own – or the world’s – politicians to bring an end to their plight.
These things may explain the psychology of Gaza.
But the plain fact is that, over recent months, the Palestinians have paid a high price for defiance – and are likely to continue to do so.
Wake up at the back!
There’s something new:
The firing of clumsy home-made rockets from Gaza into Israel may have had little material effect, but piled up the political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to act more firmly.
Welcome the “clumsy home-made rockets”. The BBC, nothing if not innovative in its search for objectivity and balance. Excuse me while I wipe away the tears…
Why doesn’t the BBC balance the sort of thing I quote above with something like this?
“It will be a chance for the fighters to show the enemy that we love death more than they love to live,” said Abu Qusai of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Fatah.
Israel estimates that between 6.5 and 11 tonnes of TNT have been smuggled into Gaza, mostly through tunnels from Egypt.
Militants have also been able to smuggle in anti-aircraft missiles, Katyusha rockets and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the army said.
According to Israel’s internal security service, militants have brought into Gaza at least 3 million bullets, nearly 20,000 assault rifles, 430 rocket-propelled grenades and several shoulder rocket launchers. A Western security source called these numbers “underestimates”.
Just to remind ourselves of the BBC story above:
Suffering is nothing new to the Palestinians, especially in the crowded, impoverished towns and refugee camps of the Gaza Strip.
They have grown used to economic hardship…
Just to remind ourselves of the BBC story above:
Suffering is nothing new to the Palestinians, especially in the crowded, impoverished towns and refugee camps of the Gaza Strip.
They have grown used to economic hardship…
Biodegradable | 28.06.06 – 7:44 pm
As Marie-Antoinette might have said: “Let them eat RPGs”
Palestinians feel very uncomfortable about splits, and are always conscious of the pressure and power radiating from Israel.
Good. That means they may eventually learn something. Someday.
On the subject of the rockets, let’s see:
We’ve had home-made, crudely-made, and now clumsy.
[I didn’t know an inanimate object could be clumsy, but that’s an aside. If only poor English were the worst of the BBC’s sins.]
I suppose they have quite a range of options here:
hand-painted
colourful
pointy
smoky
noisy
rusty
oily
Gee BBC, do we have to do all your work for you.
“The firing of clumsy home-made rockets from Gaza into Israel may have had little material effect, but piled up the political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to act more firmly.”
The clumsy and charming rockets have killed several people, sent at least a few more to hospital with varying levels of injury. The rockets have also caused substantial property damage, and a power outage.
These rockets have made a very material impact on the families of those killed by the terrorists.
I assume the 7/7 militants had little material impact as well.
BBC delenda est!
Some more adjectives for the BBC
peculiar,
minatory,
precocious,
robust,
salubrious,
raffish,
wholesome,
explosive,
benign,
gentle,
gracious,
mild
unobjectionable,
“and are always conscious of the pressure and power radiating from Israel.”
hmmm.. anyone else get a “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” feel about that phrase?
“That’s because it’s set in the future”
pity we’ve got about 500 years of torment to go through first.
*sigh*
“It will be a chance for the fighters to show the enemy that we love death more than they love to live”
well, i’m sure the IDF will be only too happy to make your wish come true.
hey, if you stand out in the open, and wave to an Apache gunship, they’ll do the job even quicker.
archduke:
“and are always conscious of the pressure and power radiating from Israel.”
hmmm.. anyone else get a “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” feel about that phrase?
Makes me think more of those “Zionist hair rays”
If it wasn’t for Natalie’s warning I’d use an appropriate expletive at this point.
Never have BBC scare quotes made me feel so angry!
Militants ‘kill’ Israeli settler
‘kill‘?
Do they mean they’re not sure he’s dead, or that he wasn’t really killed?
Maybe he just ‘died’?
What’s wrong with Terrorists murder Israeli youth?
… or perhaps Savages butcher young Jew
What’s wrong with being judgmental in situations like this?
I’m totally with Charles Johnson on this:
Yes, the Palestinians Are to Blame
Never mind the Jew who just died. At least the Beeb allows us to hear Palestinian voices: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5124172.stm
Thank you, Beeb. I needed to hear that.
Quote 1: “Power and force is not a good way, but we were obliged to use kidnapping, to use force against force. I think they must give the soldier back.”
Quote 2: “I know the kidnapping is legal because we are fighting an illegal occupation.”
Quote 3: “The kidnapping was an act of revenge for all the innocent Palestinians who have been killed.”
I’m heading to the bath-room to puke now.
@Biodegradable
He is a ‘casualty’,
BTW the BBC did a change of headline to “Seized Israeli settler found dead”.
A young Jewish settler seized by Palestinian militants in the West Bank has been found dead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5125256.stm
—-
Even though they use the term “kidnapped” in the third paragraph, they dont use it in the headline.
I think that is ‘shameful’.
Of course its just another sign of the palestinian’s savagery that rather than holding Eliyahu Asheri, alive as a hostage, they chose to kill him instead.
As I pointed out in the current open thread the Kewish concept of “pidayon shivium” means that as live hostage he almost certainly would be ransomed.
Is it just me, but all that hamas military hardware doesn’t come cheap. There has been an enourmous outflow of capital from gaza to purchase all of this military equipment. That capital is permanently lost when the equipment is used.
If UNRWA wasn’t feeding everyone in Gaza, then I feel that the palestinians would be forced to make some choices about how they allocate their capital.
Remember that the palestinian’s burned the farms that the gaza settlers left behind. Why? Because UNRWA will feed them.
Every dollar spent on aid to the palestinians free’s up another dollar for weapons.
Bio
I posted on another thread about the ridiculous use of quotes around the word ‘killed’ in the BBC’s original headline.
The story itself said his body had been found. So he was dead. And he had been alive before he was kidnapped.
Or did the BBC think he might have died of natural causes after his capture ?
Militants ‘kill’ Israeli settler
That’s a new low, even for the BBC, followed, of course, by the sly stealth edit.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Eliyahu Asheri was shot on the spot, immediately after being kidnapped. So the alleged human beings responsible for his murder were playing an evil game by claiming he was being held as a bargaining chip.
Now I pray that Gilad Shalit is still alive and can hear the Israeli advance into the terrorist nest.
Did anyone hear something on Radio 4 last night about a play the BBC is putting on about some school kids and their experiences on 7/7 as news of the day unfolds? I can’t remember if it is for TV or radio. I think it might be generally aimed at kids.
Not a bad premise for a story, you might think. But the main story within the story is about a white girl bullying a Muslim child. There is even part of the play where a Muslim girl (about 8 years old I think) is kicked off a bus by a hysterical (and presumably white) driver who tells her to ‘take your Jihad elsewhere’.
Can anyone recall any story around that time of Muslim children (or indeed Muslim adults) being kicked off buses in the aftermath of 7/7? I can’t imagine such a conversation happening at that time, particularly in London.
I just think this angle on the story is disgraceful – telling us that despite everything, white people are still the bastards in all this. Nothing short of propaganda.
Obviously even Militants ‘kill’ Israeli settler was too judgmental for the first BBC editor who arrived for work this morning (what was the night shift thinking!) so they’ve plumped for the nicely neutral Seized Israeli settler found dead
Not even any militants involved, he wasn’t kidnapped or abducted, not even ‘killed’, and he’s still a “settler” so he got what was coming to him.
Disgusting!
I’m at the point now where I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if Israel threatened to execute one of those captured Hamas “lawmakers” every hour until the kidnapped soldier, and the other “settler” are returned safely.
Bio
They altered the headline, I think, because they updated the story with inclusion of some of the AP copy.
I agree with you that the new headline is even worse. It is as if his death was a passive affair – he just died.
Once again, the BBC sanitising a story to lessen the appearance of evil by certain Palestinians.
Flying Giraffe
I heard that too, it was a play featured on Front Row and was gushingly reviewed -the BBC patting itself on the back-. From the exerpts broadcast it seemed predictably, finger-waggingly P.C.
I wish the anti-islamophobia message could have been put more robustly – along the lines of “crazed Islamicist jihadists sink to the self-righteous slaughter and persecution of innocents, but in the West, we have adopted kinder creeds and disdain such barbarism. – Copy that out neatly children and do stop being nasty to Fatima, she gets enough of that at home ….”
One of my granddaughters told us that a little Muslim girl was being bullied at school. Kids can be cruel, we all know that. And they will have been well aware of the 7/7 news and who the perpetrators were.
The school was immediately informed of this, and my granddaughter was told very firmly that it was BAD and unfair that the little girl had been bullied, and GOOD that she had told us about it.
So there is a real live instance of the very opposite of the Islamophobia in the host community that the BBC keeps banging on about. The adults acted firmly to protect the little girl, to stamp on the bullying, and to stress that mindless religious prejudice is wrong.
(That is not to say, however, that we aren’t annoyed at how many times the children are taught about Islam with virtually nil teaching of other religions – including Christianity.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/06/gaza_stories.html#commentsanchor
BBC editor fisked by commenters
If you visit the Editors blog, the subject of the latest post –“Gaza stories”– is on the so-called ‘careful’ use of words by the BBC. However, the bulk of the commenters take Jon Williams to task over glaring BBC inconsistencies and bias which has been pointed out many times in many ways by B-BBC and commenters here.
Kerry B, we’ve been discussing this on the open thread here:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/patrickcrozier/115149720855118858/#291356
Biodegradable:
thanks