The BBC reports that… thirty years ago a junior diplomat heard a rumour from an unnamed source!Our crack team of media analysts have been wondering why this decades old tittle tattle qualified for a position on the BBC front page. They
think there may be some secret code or message concealed in the wording of the headline:
Israel hijack role ‘was queried’
It has been seen as a daring raid by crack Israeli troops to rescue dozens of their countrymen held at the mercy of hijackers.
But newly released documents contain a claim that the 1976 rescue of hostages, kidnapped on an Air France flight and held in Entebbe in Uganda, was not all it seemed.
A UK government file on the crisis, released from the National Archives, contains a claim that Israel itself was behind the hijacking.
“Contains a claim”, the weasel words so good they used them twice. Here is the claim as reported by the BBC:
An unnamed contact told a British diplomat in Paris that the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) collaborated to seize the plane.
So if you get that far you discover that a junior diplomat chappie in, er, Paris, where they know all about events in Uganda and really know how to live, heard another chappie in Paris tell him that the Hand Of Israel was behind it all. The junior diplomat chappie then wrote it all down, writing down tedious gossip being what junior diplomat chappies are paid to do so that they can eventually become Ambassador to Belgium.
A little more info about the second chappie will be revealed later in this post, but even as it stands, this is pathetic. In its domestic reporting the BBC is painfully careful to avoid engendering prejudice, so careful in fact that it sometimes defeats its own object – but when Israel can be made to look bad it will grab any old mouldy leftovers from the back of the fridge and serve them up to its audience. The BBC is in no way excused by the fact it was not the only one. It is the only one I am compelled to pay for.
Hat tips to commenters Pounce and Ashley Pomeroy. The latter wrote,
“Inevitably this will be passed around the internet as the gospel truth, because it’s on the BBC. I can picture the arguments on Wikipedia in my head. “It is widely known that the Israelis faked the Entebbe crisis – even the BBC admits this” they will say.
Under the subheading “Ugandans killed” – not “Uganda soldiers killed”, just “Ugandans killed” – we learn that: “Two Israeli civilian hostages died in the shooting, and a third died later in a Nairobi hospital.”
The third hostage was an old woman who was strangled at the orders of Idi Amin, in revenge for his humiliation by the Israeli commandos. The report doesn’t say that. “A third died later” is incredibly misleading. It implies that the hostage was wounded in the shooting and expired of these wounds in hospital, whereas in reality she had been removed from the hostages before the rescue took place.”
Indeed. Dora Bloch, a 75 year old widow with dual British-Israeli nationality, was on her way to her son’s wedding when the plane was hijacked. The BBC has form on this use of “died” to mean “murdered while Jewish.” It played the same game when describing the murder of Leon Klinghoffer.
Now, about that second chappie, described as unnamed by the BBC.
The Times reported, but the BBC did not, that this mysterious person was “A contact Euro-Arab Parliamentary association”. The Times seems to have lost an “in the” at some point, but that’s nothing compared to the BBC losing a whole Euro-Arab Parliamentarian. Talk about Arab voices being silenced in the media, eh? Never mind, he did get a mention in Guardian, the Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post (Hat tip: Biodegradable for the JP) and practically every other outlet other than the BBC.
It would be nice to think that the BBC avoided mention of the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association because unlike the sheep in the Guardian / Times / Telegraph all copying the same news agency report, the ever-diligent BBC had bothered to ascertain that there is no such body. There is a Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation. But I have a feeling that someone at the Beeb just didn’t think that an Arab (OK, OK, it could have been a Euro, only I don’t think even the Foreign Office wallahs see Luxembourgian rumours about the Israelis as worth recording) … where was I? Oh, yes, someone at the Beeb just didn’t think an Arab claiming that bad things done by Arabs were really the work of duplicitous Jews had news value.
The BBC story ends,
The file does not make it clear how seriously the government took the claim that Israel also may have aided the hijackers.
And, in the great tradition of Yellow Journalism everywhere, neither does the BBC.
