The BBC is the main source of the misinformation that makes some people call all supporters of Israel ‘foam-flecked fanatics,’ and which makes us in turn think of those people as gullible fools. These wordbattles continue in the face of the mass of evidence piling up before your very eyes, evidence that some of you go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging.
Fanatical Islamists can hold meetings in Kensington Town Hall, people can write books filled with inaccuracies and propaganda, pockets of the UK can sprog radicals and recruits to Al Qa’eda, primitive cultural practices can be turned a blind eye to, and the majority will still fall for the BBC’s lulling reassurances rather than risk mentioning their concerns, and being labelled a phobic racist.
Compare two approaches to the recent activities of Hamas in Gaza. Not the crackdown by the virtue police enforcing modesty regulations upon ladies’ swimwear and shop mannequins, or the new ruling about ‘school uniform’ for girls, but the conflict between Hamas and another extreme, radical outfit that managed to cast Hamas into the absurd role of ‘more moderate.’
Think of this in the context of the BBC’s continual mantra that talking to Hamas will hasten the peace process. The BBC tells us ‘Gaza Islamist leader dies in raid,’ a strangely passive headline for a shoot-out between Hamas and the leader of Jund Ansar Allah, ‘Soldiers of the Followers of God,’ in which several people were killed and a mosque was damaged. What they wanted was an Islamic emirate, which on the face of it is what Hamas wants too. But they wanted it to be their Islamic emirate, and not Hamas’s, and they were keen to fight to the death; which they did. So everyone got what they wanted for the time being, and Hamas continues to fight against Israel which they will never recognise, no matter how much Britain, America, Mahmoud Abbas, or even the BBC, talks to them.
Ambassador Ron Proser (who spoke to John Humphrys this morning,) says of Hamas:
“sections of the media are determined to whitewash and legitimise it. They are joined by various politicians, commentators and activists, who argue that Israel and the West must talk to Hamas, so implying that it is on the verge of a switch to moderation.”
The BBC’s article, apart from a bizarre reference by Ismail Haniya to “Israeli Zionists.” portrays Hamas as reasonable people who ‘one could do business with”, Compare that with Ron Proser’s piece in the Telegraph. It begins:
“Earlier this month, Hamas launched a devastating bombardment of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire against a mosque in Rafah. The attack killed at least 22 Palestinians, including an 11-year-old girl. Over 100 more were injured and the mosque, which belonged to a rival Islamist faction, the Jund Ansar Allah, was left riddled with bullets. The adjacent building was destroyed. Yet Hamas’s disregard for the sanctity of a house of worship, and its contempt for the lives of neighbouring civilians, is unlikely to be the subject of any probing reports from Human Rights Watch.”
And criticism of them brands me as a foaming-at-the mouth phobic racist.