Monthly Archives: February 2009

At least 400 BBC employees, goodness knows how many Muslims, Annie Lennox and several MPs declare their abhorrence of Israel ‘for Gaza’. They accept Hamas’s allegations without hesitation or deviation (but with repetition.) Discussions on the BBC reduce the issue to a simple contest; who is the biggest victim, and whose warfare is fair, and whose is a crime.

Squabbling over what is and what is not a war crime, over whether Israel should endure random rocket attacks permanently because retaliation would automatically incur the crime of murdering civilians who were, or were not, imprisoned in an overpopulated hellhole with no way of escaping; disagreeing over white phosphorous, accuracy of targeting, who is a legitimate target and who is a civilian, whether this or that was deliberate or unavoidable, and who is the biggest villain, is a road to nowhere. While all this has been going on front of house, behind the scenes something else has happened.

Slowly but surely, by sleight of hand, the BBC has maneuvered Hamas into the position of graduating by stealth as a fully-fledged legitimate political entity in the eyes of the public. The BBC constantly pleads “talk to Hamas” because not to do so would be churlish, since the BBC has, with its magic trickery, legitimised, normalised and humanised it. There is only one thing worth saying: Recognise Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence, and re-educate your followers. Agreeing to any of that would entail no longer being fundamentalist extremist Islamists, so what’s the use?

The BBC has made up its mind already because it is not concerned with history, geography or a piddly little existential threat.

However many Fitnas or Panoramas we are shown that tell us there is a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and the west, the media still stops short of connecting this, multiplied several times over, with the threat Israel faces. They don’t like terrorism when it rears its head here, but are unable to empathise with what Israel has lived with since 1948.

These arguments obfuscate the real issue, which is: why is Israel fighting? Why is Hamas, fighting? Why are Syria, Iran and other assorted Arab states involved? In this topsy turvy way, by not asking these questions, the BBC has manipulated public opinion to back the wrong horse.

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Let’s be honest – Israel will never get a break on the BBC . The latter is institutionally pro-Palestinian and really struggles to disguise this each time this issue comes up. Earlier this morning, on Today, this was manifest in this item on (Sh)Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel and Hamas of war crimes and demanding an arms embargo against the Israeli state and “armed Palestinian groups”. No surprise there, I think anyone who has familiarity with AI knows that it is profoundly and sickeningly anti-Israeli but what interested me was how the BBC chose to cover this. It gave Gaza correspondent and donkey expert Aleem Maqbool the opportunity to glowingly propagandise on behalf of Hamas painting Israeli forces as homicidal monsters who deliberately target children before then switching to an accusatory interview with Israeli government spokesmen Mark Regev. I thought Regev countered quite well but the James Naughtie seemed a/ Disappointed that Hamas rockets were less effective than Israeli rockets and b/ Determined to ensure that the listener was left with the impression that Israel was the guilty party even when defending itself.