David Vance posted about how the BBC declined to describe the Palestinian who killed Israeli civilians with a bulldozer as a terrorist. Here are three more posts about BBC coverage of that act of terrorism that speak for themselves:
- Honest Reporting – Caught: BBC’s Shocking First Response to Terror Attack
- Freeborn John – Bulldozer driver murdered
- The Monkey Tennis Centre – BBC plays ‘Guess the Victims’ over Jerusalem attack.
See also: Active Israelis, Passive Palestinians.
Scandalous.
Honest Reporting’s analysis of the BBC in 2007 is shocking:
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/One_Year_Analysis_The_BBC_in_2007.asp
Just 6 reports on rockets attacks in spite of 1500 attacks in that year.
HR’s articles are excellent, though I think there is some cosy, undemocratic behind-the-scenes network going on here, that is funding and encouraging
an anti-Israel effort. The spotlight should be on puppeteer instead of the puppet.
Many television outlets, whose revenues are vulnerable to the increasing influence of the internet, seem to toe the same anti-Israel line. Maybe because it improves ratings? If it bleeds then it leads.
They clearly don’t give a shit about their biased reputations. I think the only truly effective antidote is to boycott the BBC and their ilk: no licence fees, no advertising, no subscriptions, no money, nothing.
During the second World War the BBC could be relied upon as a source of verifiable facts.
60 years after the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz the same organisation – or maybe not – exhibits a more sinister demeanor.
The Holocaust was enabled not least by concerted anti-Jewish propaganda. Notice the amply-documented role of BBC in this propaganda war.
This time around however, what is the motivation and who is responsible ?
Boy al-Beeb really did go to town on this. Well done to whoever it was who got the screengrab and preserved for posterity the sick mindset of the Beeboid tosser who composed the web page.
No excuse for this State Broadcaster lurkers – your own correspondent was right there on the spot as the incident unfolded.
Al Beeb cannot be trusted to report obectively on israel until the Balen Report is released
come on scumbag beeboids, release it, what ya got to be afraid of?
On a related subject, Iran began its terror war against Israel with the rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and has been attacking Israel through its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, ever since. Owen Bennet Jones on “Newshour” on the World Service yesterday proved yet again how curiously fond he is of Iran. He kept on insisting that the Israeli Air Force’s training exercise was some kind of provocative first move in the conflict.
Usually the BBC indulges in its rewriting of history after the fact. Here it is getting in early and doing it before the fact, presumably to make the rewriting less noticeable as the anti-Israel revisionism that it inevitably becomes.
Gerard Baker in The Times notes the continuing photofakery much loved by Palis, Reuters, France2 etc, this time in respect of the Iranian missile threat to Israel, where photos of missile launches were not all they seemed.
Bad news: clearly some of the most sophisticated and effective Western technology has fallen into Iranian hands after all. Good news: it’s Photoshop.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article4312319.ece
This is a dangerous game Iran could be playing.
Surely they have seen the end game of Saddams regime (who thought he wouldnt be touched by USA and would be saved by public opinion).
If I was Iran, Id be a bit more circumspect about relying on Western indifference because of what happened to Saddam.
Mailman
… and of course one of the eye-witnesses was the BBC’s “Court Jew” correspondent Tim “Sorry-For-Being-Alive” Samuels.
Come to think of it, he probably wrote the headline…
On what grounds was this a ‘terrorist attack’?
I had to laugh when I saw this one. This article by ‘Honest’ Reporting has been quite comprehensively debunked. In fact it is so misleading that it is hard to escape the conclusion that it was deliberately so. But then they don’t pretend to be impartial.
I had to laugh when I saw this one.
Jewish civilians, mostly women, murdered in the most horrible fashion by a crazed Arab makes you laugh?
Honest Reporting has most certainly NOT been debunked. Here’s the screenshot:
http://www.honestreporting.com/a/images/communiques/upload1/bbcscreenshot20608.jpg
What’s to “debunk”?
There were only two news headlines used on the website that day:
“Bulldozer rampage hits Jerusalem”
“Deadly Jerusalem Bulldozer Attack”.
On a separate page, moving pictures of the attack were put on the website. They were broken down into three separate sections. Each had a specific picture caption to describe what viewers could see if they chose to click on that particular sequence.
‘Israel bulldozer driver shot dead’ was under a picture caption that was used to describe the specific pictures that led up to the moment the driver was shot.
The context of this picture caption was clear. There were two other picture captions alongside it:
‘Eyewitness: Bulldozer Rampage’
‘Bulldozer Rampage in Jerusalem’
In the same way, each of these aimed to describe the specific events in the picture.
Below the caption on the shooting, there was further text that said:
‘A Palestinian has driven a bulldozer into a bus and several cars in Jerusalem, killing three people before being shot dead. Dozens of others were hurt, at least seven critically, in the incident on Jaffa Road. This video freezes just before the driver was shot dead, and shows the scene afterwards.’
“Israel bulldozer driver shot dead” was not a headline.
I was not laughing at the deaths of these Jewish civilians, as you well know Bio.
That thing usually goes without saying, but you’re quite right, in the world of BiasedBBC, sometimes you need to spell these things out.
You guys are wasting your time arguing about that headline. That’s not the real problem with the BBC’s reporting on this story.
The real problem is, as I commented as it was happening, that the Beeboids on air were openly trying to say that this could not be a terrorist attack, even before anyone knew anything about the attacker, or his motives.
For a couple of hours, they allowed a quote from an Israeli policeman using the “T”-word, but that was soon stealth-edited to a paraphrase of an Olmert press release, which also contained the “T”-word, but with less emphasis. All day long Beeboids were making a great effort to make sure the audience understood that this was not a terrorist attack. Before they even knew.
Even if this was a lone nutter taking out his anger at whatever, the BBC is not supposed to make these claims before listening to what the investigators had to say. Especially when they make such a big deal about how they normally don’t like to use the “T”-word. And especially when they know perfectly well that the cease-fire might very well have been violated by this, if it turned out to be an attack connected to one of the usual groups. This really means that the Beeboids – including Tim Franks – were deliberately trying to assure everyone that the Palestinians had not broken the cease-fire. Without knowing any facts. Just a knee-jerk reaction, showing their hand.
Complaining about the headlines misses the point, and allows the real bias to pass unnoticed.
So now it’s not about the headline, tell that to Honest Reporting.
I don’t recognise your description of the coverage. This was obviously not the typical terrorist attack that Jerusalem experiences and inevitably there will be informed speculation about the motives etc.
I don’t know whether he was an opportunistic loner or whether he was sent on a mission and the BBC wasn’t in a postion to say. But given that you were presumably watching in the US, but BBC World reported what other were saying or what was known at the time:
Here are 2 headlines used:
ISRAEL ATTACK
Police say one woman killed in premeditated attack
ISRAEL ATTACK
Police say attack was politically motivated
Joel | Homepage | 14.07.08 – 12:10 pm |
So now it’s not about the headline, tell that to Honest Reporting.
I don’t care if HR thinks it’s a big deal. That’s low-hanging fruit, questionable at best, and not worth bothering about.
I don’t recognise your description of the coverage. This was obviously not the typical terrorist attack that Jerusalem experiences and inevitably there will be informed speculation about the motives etc.
I don’t know whether he was an opportunistic loner or whether he was sent on a mission and the BBC wasn’t in a postion to say. But given that you were presumably watching in the US, but BBC World reported what other were saying or what was known at the time:
Here are 2 headlines used:
ISRAEL ATTACK
Police say one woman killed in premeditated attack
ISRAEL ATTACK
Police say attack was politically motivated
I was watching BBC World News live on the television first, then listening to the World Service live on the radio. I made comments here at the time:
The correspondent in Jerusalem (Paul something) was trying to talk about how there aren’t nearly as many attacks on Israeli citizens as there used to be. As they play back footage of the scene, the camera pans past an overturned bus, and the Jerusalem Beeboid mentions that there used to be regular “suicide” attacks – then he caught himself and amended that to “bomb attacks, primarily bomb attacks” on buses, etc. As if the majority of attacks on buses and cafes were made using some sort of range weapon. The word “suicide” was not mentioned again.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/patrickcrozier/6465773959438935735/#407232
What’s more, the presenter in the studio brought up the statement from Hamas about the incident, where they said this was “the result of Israeli aggression,” and that they didn’t know who was behind it.
He summed up by saying that now “we know why it happened.”
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/patrickcrozier/5049185423519907923/#407276
and:
Joe Flotow (sp?) was just on the phone from Jerusalem, and the World Service woman in the studio made every effort to make sure this could not be called a terrorist attack. It seems that unless the bulldozing murderer was associated with an organization that has already been labeled as terrorist, this can’t be a terrorist attack.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/patrickcrozier/5049185423519907923/#407279
And you recognize none of this? I was certainly following the BBC coverage very closely, and my quotes are accurate.