Along with various Biased BBC commenters

, I couldn’t help but notice how this BBC Views Online story, Three dead in Israel suicide bomb, about the tragic murder yesterday of three people in Eilat, had this paragraph tagged on to the end of it:

The last suicide attack was at a Tel Aviv restaurant, killing 10 people. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in that time, mainly in the Gaza Strip.

The first of these sentences is of course wrong. They mean the last suicide attack in Israel.

The second sentence is just plain irrelevant to the story, although the cub journos responsible for this addition will doubtless claim that it adds ‘essential context’. Hogwash. Unless every story of ongoing Middle East violence is to be accompanied by a potted history of recent Middle Eastern events (which this one sentence just isn’t) or a scoreboard of deaths going back till who knows when, then that line just shouldn’t be tagged on to the end of this story apropos of nothing else in particular.

The second sentence doesn’t even read sensibly. When they say “Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in that time”, what time do they mean? Do they mean ‘since then’, since the last suicide terror murders? If so, wouldn’t it make sense to say that clearly? (They do mention April 2006 waaaay up at the top of the piece, but the two don’t seem to be otherwise related). Bleedin’ amateurs – can’t even propagandise clearly!

For anyone interested in following the development of this tawdry BBC Views Online attempt at news reporting, the wonderful News Sniffer Revisionista is the place to go (for some strange reason the BBC refuse to provide their telly-taxpaying customers with this information themselves).

The successive versions revealed by News Sniffer are quite illuminating, particularly the differences between versions 11 & 12 (see the News Sniffer page linked above). Notice how the story is massaged and a couple of chunks are excised, as if to downplay the horror of this incident – for instance, this line:

The force of the explosion left body parts scattered around the bakery, while outside trays of bread lay on the blood-stained pavement.

magically disappears, as does this sentiment from the UN’s Middle East envoy:

I feel deeply for those killed and I share the pain of their families. I send them my deepest condolences.

I wonder why these chunks were cut out. Reasons of space perhaps? No more room on the BBC’s servers?

While we’re on the subject of the Eilat murders, earlier, on BBC News Twenty-Bore, the BBC’s reporter on the spot (‘Going live!’) was making much of this being the first suicide terror attack in months (although he didn’t use the word ‘terror’, natch) and that things had been relatively quiet until today.

Hogwash, again. This is the first successful suicide terror attack in months. According to the former Labour MP, Lorna Fitzsimons, interviewed in Eilat by Sky News, there have been 62 foiled attacks over the last nine months. Whatever the exact figure, there have been many, many attempted attacks, with only Israel’s high state of security and the vigilance of Israeli citizens and security services preventing the indiscriminate murder of many more civilians – not that these failed attacks were mentioned on either BBC Views Online or on BBC News Twenty-Bore. Strange that, since the Beeboids are so keen on adding ‘essential context’.