‘As early as the first paragraph of the Introduction he claims that “never a thought is given to Gaza” in the city of Tel Aviv.’
I lifted that from ‘Philosemite’ Chas Newkey Burden’s blog post about Gideon Levy’s book “The Punishment of Gaza”, which elicited a lively response from people who think of Levy as an obnoxious self serving liar.
Seeing as how Gideon Levy has been hobnobbing with Jeremy Bowen at the Edinburgh Festival, I immediately wondered if this was the source of this morning’s report by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in which he decided to contrast heartless greedy Jews of Tel Aviv with a couple of Palestinian ‘victims’ in Nablus.
However, as one of the Palestinians seemed to be threatening another intefada, and the other had just been acquiring an MBA from Exeter University, which some see as a Saudi-funded academic enclave and possible hotbed of Islamist subversion nestling incongruously in a South West rural idyll, this seemed at odds with the Beeb’s normal practice of showcasing the righteousness of the Palestinians and the wrongteousness of the Israelis.
The Israelis he interviewed sounded somewhat easier to identify with than the Palestinians this time. So you slipped up there Rupert old bean if you don’t mind my saying so.
Does the theme that runs through the BBC’s presentation of the middle east conflict, namely that the Israelis are land-grabbing expansionist warmongers, actually stem from Jeremy Bowen’s superficial grasp of the situation? He recently exposed this when he stated that a religious element has been “grafted on” to what was fundamentally an issue about land.
Melanie Phillips touches on the topic of ill-informed journalism in this article about the misrepresentation of Jewish history underpinning a Christian theme park in Mallorca:
“It is a narrative which gives the lie to the naive belief that the Middle East impasse is a fight over land boundaries. It is instead an attempt to excise from the region not just the Jewish state of Israel, not just every single Jew from a future state of Palestine, but the historical evidence that this land – including Judea and Samaria – was the Jewish national home centuries before Arabs invaded and conquered it, and many more centuries before Arabs started to style themselves as Palestinian.[…..]
Isn’t it wonderful to have quality newspapers written by educated writers?”
The BBC should educate its journalists, if only because they wield such a disproportionate influence.
Ignorance in journalism is deplorable, but nothing satisfactorily explains the BBC’s “wholesale adoption of the fictional Arab narrative”
