Another day another BBC spin for “Palestinians”. I caught a “Today” story at 7.20am or so about the way in which Palestinian “collaborators” are badly treated by Israeli state. We got to hear several comments from one of these “collaborators” based in Sderot balanced by ONE SENTENCE from a Jewish inhabitant of that much bombed by Hamas city. Don’t you think the use of the word “collaborator” a bit odd by our ever-so-impartial BBC? It reeks of that much-feared judgementalism that Al-Beeb tries to avoid in most other circumstances and one would almost expect it to be the term of choice used by Hamas for those who betray its nasty little secrets. What’s wrong with the word “informers”? Is the BBC now reduced to using the Hamas terminology, just like it did the IRA terminology? Given that Sderot has suffered such a pounding from Palestinian rocket bombardment, it’s quite amazing to find the BBC nonetheless churning out these stories continually portraying Palestinians as the victims of Israeli ingratitude. Shame on them.
COLLABORATORS.
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I too caught this and submitted a comment to your general thread at the time. What irritated me as well was the way that the fact that Palestinians who have “collaborated” with the Israelis and are now mostly living in Sderot apparently helps to explain why that town is the target for Palestinian rockets – the subtext being that it also excuses the firing of the rockets. As if that was not enough, the Israeli government was also criticised for not treating the collaborators well enough and the collaborators’ neighbours criticised for negative feelings towards them. The BBC no story on Israel small enough to tell if it can be spun against Israel. Any news on the Balen report BBC?
This was the term used for citizens of Norway, Holland etc who collaborated with the Nazis. Natural choice for Al Beeb, then.
‘It reeks of that much-feared judgementalism that Al-Beeb tries to avoid in most other circumstances’
I’m glad you think the BBC attempts to be impartial in most circumstances, I knew you’d ciome around eventually.
The BBC is supposed by law to be impartial in all cases, Joel. And this one didn’t even attempt it – collaborators is a key word in the campaign to equate the Israelis with the Nazis.
Contemptible. I want my money back.
Oh, and since when did “non-judgementalism” mean the same thing as impartiality? The two are diametrically opposed.
I’m sure we all know the literal meaning of the word collaborator, but just to emphasize the point….
col•lab•or•ator /k{shwa}’laeb{shwa}re{I}t{shwa}(r)/ noun
1 a person who works with another person to create or produce sth such as a book
2 (disapproving) a person who helps the enemy in a war, when they have taken control of the person’s country
Do people here think the BBC Court Jew Tim Franks is a collaborator? I do.
So it’s inaccurate too – Israel does not have control of Gaza. Hamas has.
“I’m glad you think the BBC attempts to be impartial in most circumstances”
Irony is wasted on beeboids, innit?
“So it’s inaccurate too – Israel does not have control of Gaza.”
The word you are looking for is ‘lie’.
Don’t you think the use of the word “collaborator” a bit odd by our ever-so-impartial BBC? […] one would almost expect it to be the term of choice used by Hamas for those who betray its nasty little secrets.
David, it is exactly the term used by Hamas, and Fatah, which is why I don’t find it odd in the least.
All BBC output from the “Palestinian” Administered territories must be OKed by the terrorists, or else:
http://www.israellycool.com/2008/05/27/hamas-continues-to-harrass-and-threaten-journalists/
Yeah, but Hamas call the Jews “monkeys and pigs”, yet I would find it odd (but not entirely surprising) if the BBC used these terms too.
Yes, how come they don’t? Their Hamas masters must be very surprised and angry.
rob | 29.05.08 – 1:02 pm
Are we then to be grateful for small mercies?
Ha-ha, nice bit of synchronicity here.
I, too, heard the collaborators report this morning, though
I couldn’t be arsed to actually listen to it.
However, I’ve been engrossed in recent online piece from
The New Yorker, which contains this gem…
‘On the Day of Judgment, every double-crosser will have a banner up his anus proportionate to his treachery.’
The article by Lawrence Wright is important, timely and, of course, is being completely ignored by the MSM, though a hat tip is due to The Belmont Club for steering it our way
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?currentPage=1
Mr Vance, generally I like to read your comments but I don’t like to comment on posts with no link. No link means that only those who caught the programme can join in the thread.
http://www.atangledwebb.com/
Joel is typical of the left wing idiots who think that being “unbiased” means never making an objective judgment of morality. To them, valuing life over death is “judgmental”.
It comes to something when the Beeb apologists here don’t even have the intellect to understand what political bias actually is and what it’s not.
No link means that only those who caught the programme can join in the thread.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/
And the online piece related to this subject..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7424283.stm
which contains the gem “In the last few years, a growing number of collaborators from Gaza have ended up in the Israeli town of Sderot, the place that, more than any inside Israel, has come under missile fire from Palestinian militants in Gaza.”
….so you see, they had it coming to them.
Thank you Biodegradable, I’ll give it a listen to later when I get home.
The article does use the word ‘informants’ once, then repeatedly says ‘collaborators’. This is offensive bias, given these facts:
1. as other above note, the word is freighted in English usage to refer to those who helped Nazi occupiers – and not just with information but also ‘aid and comfort’;
2. Israel isn’t in Gaza, so all they are doing is giving information of criminal attempts to murder people in Israel. I call such people ‘informants’. (Actually they are servants of humanity.) Would the BBC call people in the UK who gave trhe police information ‘collaborants’ or ‘informants’? (Well, give them time …)
3. What did the BBC call people who informed on the IRA? ‘informers’, IIRC.
When is the BBC going to ask Hamas ‘militants’ (terorists) why they are attacking the State of Israel? This is despicable.
After I listened to this item I wondered if there had been a competition to see how many times the collaborator word could be inserted into such a short item.
No suggestion of course that the moral blame associated with betrayal could be correlated with the moral worth of what is betrayed!
wonder how long before Al Beeb uses the word “capitulated” in its middle east reporting
beeboid scumbags
The BBC has its own way with words, and its own ethics about quoting and misquoting.
Defiant Israeli PM vows to stay
Photo caption: Mr Talansky said the money was often handed over in cash-stuffed envelopes
Nowhere in the report, or in Mr. Talansky’s evidence is the term “cash-stuffed envelopes” used by him.
Example nº2:
Tutu: Gaza blockade abomination
(note the lack of ‘quotes’ around “abomination”)
He said his meeting with the deposed prime minister, Ismail Haniya, was an opportunity to tell the Hamas leader the firing of rockets into Israel was also a violation of human rights.
Leaving aside for the moment the use of “the deposed prime minister” to describe Haniya, and the fact that the article is stuffed full of whatever else the BBC can find to paint Israel as the eternal aggressor, the BBC reports “an opportunity to tell the Hamas leader the firing of rockets into Israel was also a violation of human rights.”
Also? As well as…?
And what about the full content of what the abominable Tutu actually said?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3549428,00.html
He also urged militants to stop launching rockets at Israel.
“We told Mr (Ismail) Haniyeh that firing rockets was a gross violation of human rights,” Tutu said, referring to the Gaza-based Hamas leader.
The BBC: an abomination unto itself.
These ‘collaborators’ are doing a great service, wherever they ‘end up’, as the Beeb-arses put it.
If it means a few Hamas thugs ‘end up’ as smoking carcases that’s fine with me.
Tutu is a tit. Wow, that felt good to say.
Have you seen his latest project? Another bunch of useless humanitarian wankers picking on the wrong countries!
http://theelders.org/
Sure he is a tit. But isn’t that a picture of Mandela?
On the World Service this afternoon the newscasts blared out Tutu’s statement that Gaza was an “abomination” and that the international community’s “complicity and silence” was “shameful” and should be compared to the attitude of the Burma regime. (Not sure why Tutu plucked that comparison out of the air, I suppose because Burma is topical after the cyclone.)
Tutu was also discussed on World Briefing I believe, and generally had the royal carpet rolled out for him. But one had to listen really carefully to learn, at the very end of one or two of these reports, that Tutu had also condemned Hamas Kassam attacks on Israel.
That’s the BBC – always covering up for the terrorists by minimising exposure of their actions.
Tutu was taken on a two-day tour of Gaza. The itinerary of that trip would make interesting reading. I imagine the highlight of the trip was a visit to the village that was deluged by the burst sewage dam, blamed on the Zionists, of course. And any inspection of border crossings would surely have taken place when there was a pause in the flow of goods into Gaza. And no doubt Tutu’s route through Gaza would as far as possible have wound past buildings damaged by Israeli attacks which would be passed off as orphanages deliberately targeted by Israel with shiny clean dolls strategically placed in the rubble.
Not that Tutu would have needed any tuition. He was a knee-jerk bleeding-heart PC fool playing the blame game long before Hamas started fiddling with Pallywood to disguise the hideous face of its terror.
In Hebrew these Arabs are called משתף פעולה ‘meshatef poala’. Literally, associates in an action. My online dictionary translates that as collaborators.
They weren’t exactly respected. When I was in the armer they were known as stinkers, presumably from the English word.
I don’t regard Palestinians who tell Israel about planned terror attacks as “collaborators” or “informers.” I see them as espionage agents, putting their lives on the line in the War on Terror.
It’s actually meshatef pe’ula, which means quite literally co-operators (shituf = to share, co-; pe’ula = operation, action).
True, the word can be used for ‘collaborator’, since Hebrew doesn’t have 2 distinct terms, unlike English which often has 1 word derived from Latin via French and 1 word derived from Germanic origins.
Bryan,
Since 1921 and continuing, the Arabs of Palestine have fallen into two groups. Those cooperating with the Jews for the benefit of both sides (which include all those who remained in Israel in 1948) and the Jihadi gangs that have terrorised them into submission from 1921 onwards, killing and driving out many of them from the 1930s through 1948 and right down to the present factions ruling the Palestinian Authority (both Hamas and Fatah).
Calling the first group “collaborators” is tantamount to sanctioning the Jihadi gangs that have oppressed them for nearly a century now. This is one of the central travesties in the concept of the conflict as presented by the BBC and the rest of the supposedly pro-Palestinian crowd.
The word “collaborators” is a very loaded word – chosen to paint a picture.
It’s normally used to describe WW2 frenchmen who were closer to the german occupying forces than they should have been.
This use of the word is not an accident.
Tutu and Mandela – a lovely pair of tits.
Anat (Israel) | 30.05.08 – 5:34 am,
I agree totally.
Jack Hughes | 30.05.08 – 8:17 am |
This use of the word is not an accident.
Exactly. The word “collaborator” has a specific emotional impact, as does the word “terrorist”. Yet Nick Reynolds and others keep saying they prefer not to use “terrorist” for just that reason.
The BBC’s editorial policy these days exists not on paper, but solely in the minds of the editors. Revealed here for all to see.
The word collaborator may be being used deliberately. I see in The Guardian that “The University and College Union voted overwhelmingly at its Manchester conference to call on colleagues to “consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating”.”
Keep repeating the lie and people will accept it…
“… to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating”
What that really means is to interrogate and ostracize those who support Israel.
See here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/736686/the-universities-witchhunt-against-the-jews.thtml
Yes, a charming melding of McCarthyism and Nazism.