Jeremy Bowen doesn’t do things by half. Not content with merely reporting the news, in his own inimitable way, he has decided to play his part in making it, and history along with it, replacing Tony Blair as Middle East Envoy and deciding Israel has logically no right to exist if Palestinians don’t get their demands answered.
His reply when asked about the possibility of a one state solution he replies:
So Israel won’t exist in 20 years or so predicts Bowen….remember a UN representative admitted a one state solution meant Israel would be destroyed.
Bowen made an appearance on ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ (7 mins 35) on which he was supposed to tell us of the new unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas and how it would alter things in the Middle East…instead he gave us a rather politicised, anti-Israeli, anti-Fatah, pro-Hamas take on history…before finally getting to the ‘unity’ bit…which turned out to be yet more anti-Israeli guff.
Starting off by painting a picture of Gaza as an open prison, but not detailing the 60 years of war inflicted upon Israel, Bowen goes on eventually to enlighten us about the outcome of the recent thawing in relations between Hamas and Fatah……he starts by highlighting a story of a Hamas member who says he was tortured by a Fatah dominated police force.
This is just Bowen setting the scene to excuse what the BBC like to downplay…the massacre of Fatah men by Hamas in 2007….which the BBC at the time dismissed as Hamas ‘merely flushing out the corrupt and violent Fatah’.
How did Hamas do that? By killing every Fatah member they could lay their hands on….they roamed the hospitals killing Fatah men, they took Fatah members to the tops of buildings and threw them off, they killed Fatah members in front of their families.
But for the BBC that was, and obviously still is, OK….Bowen excuses the violence today because he tells us Palestinians were sick of Fatah’s ‘excesses, corruption and ineptitude’….so Hamas slaughtered them.
There’s absolutely no idea from Bowen that Hamas tortured and killed at will….Bowen just gives the impression that it is only Fatah who do such things…..a familiar ring to that line of thinking from Bowen as Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood franchise and so must be ‘moderate’.
Bowen then latches onto a conspiracy theory to further excuse the violence….The USA was conspiring with Fatah to remove Hamas after the election in 2006….not mentioning that Hamas was, and is, designated as a terrorist organisation threatening to annihilate Israel.
Curiously I can find no report from the BBC from the time claiming this was due to a US inspired Coup….there are some from others…but the usual suspects, anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas.
Bowen tells us that the Americans helped Fatah prepare a coup against Hamas but Hamas moved first and amid brutal scenes Hamas unceremonioulsy ejected Fatah from the positions of power it still held.
Bowen tells us that the coup was organised by PA security commander Mohammed Dahlan who ‘escaped’….trouble is Dahlan wasn’t in the country at the time, he was having medical treatment in Europe…so how he organised a coup and set it in motion whilst not being there to command it…and then ‘escape’…is hard to imagine…unless you’re Bowen.
There were certainly plans to bolster the PA and channel funds to them…but this was as part of a bigger picture in developing the Palestinian ‘State’, bringing peace and security to it and to persuade Hamas to recognise Israel and give up its threats to annihilate Israel…and thence to negotiate peace with Israel.
There is no evidence that the US organised an actual coup attempt….that is merely a matter of interpretation.
Bowen’s overblown claim that the Americans were organising a ‘coup’ originated in a document obtained from an ‘Arab intelligence service’ by an Arab nationalist newspaper, Al-Majd, in Jordan in April 2007.
Bowen is claiming that this sudden revelation tipped the balance and forced Hamas to attack Fatah in Gaza in June 2007.
He no doubt would back his claim with the ‘evidence’ from this article in Vanity Fair in 2008: The Gaza Bombshell
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs.
(Note the article uses the same layout as Bowen…opening with a description of a Hamas man tortured by Fatah men)
Trouble with that is….they didn’t ‘cook up’ anything…the attempts to bolster the PA were already well under way long before any election put Hamas in charge.
Even MI6 (no comment!) were involved…..
UK’s MI6 ‘tried to weaken Hamas’
Leaked documents relating to the Middle East peace process suggest Britain’s intelligence service has been closely involved in attempts to weaken Hamas.
The documents, published by al-Jazeera, date back to 2004, before the militant group won elections in 2006 and took control of the Gaza Strip.
So no link to the al-majd document….and so no ‘US organised coup’ about to kick off that Hamas immediately had to tackle.
Bowen forgets to mention the main problem (Curious he forgets…as he wrote it in 2006):
US President George W Bush said the poll was a “wake-up call” for the Palestian leadership, but he hoped Mr Abbas would stay in power.
He said the US would not deal with Hamas unless it renounced its call to destroy Israel.
So if Hamas did renounce violence…the US would deal with them! Undermines Bowen’s theory that the US were out purely to destroy Hamas.
Bowen also forgets to state that it was well known that all aid to Hamas was cut off in 2006 and it was channelled to the Palestinian Authority…so no surprise to Hamas a year later….nor does Bowen mention Hamas received its funding from Russia and Iran….Iran clearly stating it wants to finish off the State of Israel, and Russian no doubt would like to see America’s ally in the region taken out of the equation.
The United States is pressing the Palestinian government to not only recognize Israel, but to renounce violence and form a national unity government with the moderate Fatah party.
Since Hamas took power in March, direct international aid to the Palestinian government has been largely cut off. Iran has provided the government with $120 million this year, boosting its influence among Palestinians.
Haniyeh (Hamas PM) called Iran, a longtime ally of Hamas, the Palestinians’ “strategic depth” because they were bound together in their fight against Israel.
“They (Israelis) assume the Palestinian nation is alone. This is an illusion. … We have a strategic depth in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.
Why was Hamas refused funding? Both Europe and the USA designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation…as does Israel:
Israel will not conduct any negotiation with a Palestinian government, if it includes any (members of) an armed terror organisation that calls for Israel’s destruction Ehud Olmert Acting Israeli Prime Minister
Bowen then moves on to his main theme…criticising Israel….apparently Israel still runs Gaza and it can blockade Gaza in a way that is ‘devastating for the civilians’.
Then he finally gets to the point of the piece…the new agreement between Fatah and Hamas….Bowen claims that such unity will lead ‘to war crime prosecutions for Israelis and there’s BDS, or Boycott, Disvestment and Sanctions, the idea is for Israel to be as isolated as South Africa was in the 1980’s…that worries the Israelis more and more.’
So Bowen takes 95% of his time to explain away Hamas’ actions and to condemn Fatah and the US, and then moves on to tell us that Israel ‘devastates’ civilians in Gaza, but a unified Palestinian government will lead to Israel being prosecuted for war crimes and a rise in the BDS campaign.
Why has he linked these things? It seems the only reason he links them to the unified (for now) Palestinians is as an excuse to mention them and raise their profile…he makes no mention of Palestinian war crimes and atrocities, nor does he question the BDS campaign’s legitimacy.
Why does he not raise the prospect that a unified Palestinian government might be in a better position to negotiate peace with Hamas persuaded to rein in its wilder elements. A more hopeful scenario than Bowen’s entirely negative one…after all what good are war crime trials and BDS? They seem only designed to ‘attack’ Israel.
Bowen’s conclusions seem nothing more than an excuse to promote the two ideas and damage Israel.
Remember who made these comments…‘most people would consider the Muslim Brotherhood as a force for moderation’….’it is wrong to stereotype them as Islamists’.
“What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.
The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government”
That last being a Bowen memo to the troops on Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007 …his final sentence gives the game away:
The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse.
So…not a US inspired coup that led to Hamas/Fatah violence?
Hamas brutality against Fatah and Palestinians…posted by an Arab.
When was the last time a Muslim, or anyone, had to flee Israel to escape persecution or civil war eh?
But they were forced to flee by their own people!!!!. It is through an unusual source that we can get a. glimpse of a historical reality that is rarely published today. The PLO’s official magazine Al Thura published in March 1976 has the following:
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians …but, instead they abandoned them forced them to emigrate….imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews lived in Europe”
The irony is that the author of these insights was Abu Mazen,( Mahmoud Abbas.)
Abu Bowen is nothing more than a tool for Islamic terrorist Propaganda.
He ‘went native’ years ago, any rational thinking went with it, leaving a single cell mentality…..idiot.
It’s a pity he wasn’t sat in the back of the taxi when it received the tank round.
I, too, heard that item from ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ last week, and listened to J. Bowen with increasing amazement. It was so blatantly biased, even by his own low standards, that I wondered who on earth would allow this sort of one-sided reporting. Then I remembered it was the BBC . . . . Oh, for the like of Michael Elkins back with us, and balanced reporting.
Well when Iran gets the bomb Jeremy Bowen will get his wish.
typical pro Islam bbc.
We know Bowen is biassed, but what is more important is the wider context of the bias we see in Middle East reporting.
And that bias begins with the FCO, which in itself is an ‘Arabist’ leaning organisation. There can be many theories as to why it has taken this stance over the years. One would be security based, not wanting to make Britain a target for Arabic terrorism in the 70’s. This was a tactic surely rendered obsolete in 2003.
Second might be security of energy supply. Another might be simply that they recruit from the UK university system which has an inbuilt left of centre stance in policy affairs.
But whatever the root cause, I can see no strategic future in this ‘Arabist’ stance, as one by one the Arab nations try to either wage war on their neighbours turf with proxy armies, or tear themselves apart in revolutionary religious zeal.
It’s better they are killing each other rather than having a go at us.
Of this complaint to the BBC about Jeremy Bowen in 2006 http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/govs/apps_nov06.pdf
What was interesting was the BBC’s Middle East Foreign Correspondent’s harsh and angry tone mirrored the feelings that were behind the .extract from the Anti Semitic Lebanese Star newspaper.as he was reading it. It was clear from his tone of voice that he agreed with and wanted to endorse the statements he was reading out. .. He was reading an overlong extract out for a regular programme “What the Newspapers Say” on Radio 4. The BBC clearly understood the power and effect of the way the words were read out on air .When the appeal against this programme was eventually heard we were sent a recording of the programme. The recording they sent back had been re-recorded. His voice now did not reflect any of the emotion and aggression that had previously been displayed in his voice. The reading was now delivered in a bland and soft mannered way. This would make a huge difference to the way anyone would react to this extract.
Thanks Lynette, interesting about re-recording an item. Someone within the BBC must have deliberately done that (implicitly realising their bias) and do I think the Trust must have known what was done? I suspect it was on the ‘ask no questions’ basis. But the the Trust can show that they consider the most spurious of complaints.
Incidentally , MP Denis McShane took this complaint of the language used by Jeremy Bowen against the Jews as very offensive and dangerous even though he had quoted from the Lebanese newspaper.. He appealed directly to the Director General of the BBC. against the ruling that had dismissed our complaint. The correspondence is confidential bur I can tell you that he was most upset by the response. .
http://honestreporting.com/special-alert-bbc-mideast-editor-guilty-of-inaccuracy-on-israel-2/
A feature of every Arab society to a greater or lesser degree is the battle between the groups we label Islamist and the groups we label nationalist</i. The differences are fundamental and go far beyond a tactical dispute on the best way to destroy Israel. Neither is prepared to tolerate the idea and hand over power if the electorate decides.
http://bbcwatch.org/2014/05/07/bbc-ignores-hamas-show-of-force-in-ramallah/
I don’t know if Biased BBC ever mentioned this but the National Union of Journalists rejected an Israel boycott in April. Both the BBC and the Guardian branches spoke against the boycott.