Some astonishing quotes from the BBC’s Paul Adams…H/T Craig at Is the BBC biased? (You know what, I think it might be):
Generations [of Gazans] has experienced nothing but occupation, embargo, blockade, war and death. It’s had a slow brutalising effect. Perhaps that’s why some of them are seized by such a furious desire to tunnel out and seek revenge. For Gaza is a giant prison, surrounding by a wall, watchtowers and the most sophisticated military in the Middle East.
But when so many of those dismembered and burned by Israeli rockets and shells are not the fighters but women, old people and, especially, children, then it’s really, really hard not to conclude that the Palestinians are being collectively punished.
No..it isn’t a prison..the walls are to keep the Palestinian murderers out of Israel….collectively punished? Yes…by Hamas and all the other Arab countries that keep Palestinians in poverty and continue to use them as a weapon against Israel.
If you want perspective you won’t find it on the BBC.
If you want a narrative that is feeding into the rise of 1930’s style anti-Semitism you will.
Here is what Mark Twain thought of the Muslim controlled Holy Lands:
‘ “This wasteland of Palestine,” with “its miniscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own.”
Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal “bucksheesh.” To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. ‘
No doubt Adams and his ilk would say Twain was small minded and crude….but then who would know better than Paul Adams what small minded and crude would look like? He has a mirror I presume.
So things don’t change much…even the language and attitudes remain….the one word Muslim activists know is ‘Islamophobia’….in essence exactly the same as ‘Bucksheesh’….begging for special treatment and handouts.
Funny how all the facts are thrown out the window when the Palestinian propaganda is recited by this over-excited BBC-droid. Cynical firing of rockets daily from civilian locations into Israel is suddenly is suddenly turned into righteous anger. Tunnels are to escape, not an entry point from which to attack Israel.
It is not Palestinian anger that pays the rocket-men, it is Iran. Palestine is the wound kept open and prevented from healing, in order to keep the arab world obsessing over Israel.
Typical BBC, left is right, up is down, black is white, wrong is right.
The BBC’s wilful ignorance would be laughable if its consequences weren’t so tragic.
‘Describing Palestinians as “refugees” living in “refugee camps” is a further example of politicized word choice. The original group of Palestinians in 1948 left their homes in the face of an impending aggression by Arab countries and moved into canvas tents with primitive sanitation. Regardless of arguments about whether Israeli Palestinians “fled” or, as Noam Chomsky would have it, were pushed out by a campaign of ethnic cleansing, this original group can rightly be called refugees. However, to continue to call their descendants refugees sixty-three years later, as Obama did in his Middle East/North Africa speech, distorts the truth of their situation.
Sixty-three years is time enough for three, perhaps four, generations. Imagine the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Jewish refugees who came to Brooklyn or Brookline after the Holocaust referring to themselves as refugees…….’
And as with so many political issues, it’s no surprise to find the BBC totally in step with our good friends at the UN on this, just as they are with the UN-sponsored IPCC, architects of the great global warming swindle:
‘The conduit for most of the money pouring into the Palestinian camps is the UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, which was set up as a temporary agency in 1949. Its current budget is $1.2 billion, which compares to the total “regular” U.N budget of $4.9 billion. Including all “extrabudgetary” programs (which includes UNRWA), the total 2010-11 UN budget is $13.9 billion. Thus the UN spends an amount equal to 25% of its regular budget, or 8.6% of its total budget on 0.08% of the world’s population.
UNRWA is, for obvious reasons, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. A press release on May 16th following the “Nakba Day” assault on Israeli borders from the UNRWA Commissioner-General (their website offers his photo but not his name) gives an idea of where their sympathies lie:
I deplore the deaths of Palestine refugees in Lebanon, the occupied Golan Heights and the occupied Palestinian territory [“occupied” is another code word for the illegitimacy of Israel–repeated not once but twice]. These sad events demonstrate once more the vulnerability of the Palestine refugees we serve…They underline the need for a just and durable solution, based on UN resolutions, to resolve the plight of those who have endured statelessness, exile and dispossession for 63 years.‘
….blithely ignoring the fact that the very existence of these so-called ‘refugee camps’ was the Arab states’ rejection of a UN 2-state resolution in 1948 because they couldn’t wait to invade the new state of Israel and ‘wipe it off the map’. They didn’t, but managed to create the refugee problem instead which over the years has somehow become Israel’s fault (BBC, hang your heads in shame).
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/05/the_myth_of_the_palestinian_re.html
Weren’t there also something like 800,000 Jews kicked out of other arab lands at the same time that these arabs in the land known as palestine, were told by their arab masters to quit their homes because of the impending war with fledgling Israel? Are these 800,000 displaced Jews to be regarded as refugees with a right of return; and presumably compensation for their substantial losses at the time of their eviction?
Also approximately one-third of Arabs living in the nascent state of Israel chose to stay – yes, they were given a choice. Most of the Arab refuges who chose to leave were not given shelter, let alone any kind of immigration status, in most of the Arab countries save for Jordan – and even they kept most of the ‘Palestinians to be’ in refugee camps up until the 1967 Arab war against Israel.
Yes a bizarre use of the word…it would indicate that the BBC thinks they should have a right to return.
The same therefore could be said for the millions of Sikhs and Hindus forced from their land when Muslims stole what is now ‘Pakistan’ in their own ‘zionist’ annexation.
Does the BBC support the ‘right of return’ of all those ‘refugees’ to the lands and homes now occupied by Muslims?
Funny how no one is campaigning on the streets for that…nor complaining about the 300 terrorist training camps inside Pakistan, nor about the Taliban, which is a Pakistani proxy army in Afghanistan, nor about Pakistan’s attempts to occupy Indian Kashmir….or indeed any other Islamist generated killing spree around the world of which there are many to choose from.
Technically the Palestinians are refugees because they are uniquely defined as such by UNRWA. Every other refugee in the world is defined under UNHCR’s completely different definition.
Refugee camps still exist, even with clearly permanent and solid buildings because UNRWA distributes aid through the camps. It is not known how many camp residents actually live in camps or actually live at all as anything other than names allowing the Palestinian ‘bosses’ to collect.
Ironically many of the camps are in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority meaning they are refugees in their own country. If you include Jordan most Palestinian refugees are resident in what was the British Mandate of Palestine.
Paul Adams. I could have predicted every word of this priviledged w*nkers personal bio:
“Adams was born in Lebanon in 1961, where his father served as Middle East correspondent for the Guardian. His family eventually settled in the United Kingdom, living in Sussex and Kent. Adams attended the prestigious Sevenoaks School and graduated from the University of York, where he studied English” (Wikipedia).
Total privileged champagne metro-socialist with a leg up from posh background, now writing lefty-tripe for the BBC.
They are all the same. Welcome to the new ruling class – which you pay for.
No! Ex-Guardian writing for the BBC?
Well knock me down with a feather….
I find it hard to believe that Mark Twain would misspell “minuscule” as “miniscule”.
What an ignorant nit-picking comment.
Either mode of spelling has been in use for well over a century. Mark Twain did visit Jerusalem, and he was scathing about most of the people he found there.
Mark Twain, on his visit to the Muslim-controlled Holy Land, would have been wading in exactly two fathoms of human excrement !
That first paragraph does not appear in Innocents Abroad. Do have any evidence that he actually wrote it? Can you or anyone else quote the publication it came from?
The second paragraph is a direct quote from pages 559/560 of Mark Twain’s book :
“Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal “bucksheesh.” To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.”
http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/innocent/text/inn53.html
Various writers have used that passage and others by Twain as a description of how empty and rotted the whole area was 150 years ago.
Yes, the first paragraph of the post is from elsewhere – in fact from a book by Netanyahu, which refers several times to the Mark Twain account of his travels. Netanyahu wrote :
“This wasteland of Palestine,” with “its miniscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own”
Netanyahu quotes 2 other bits of Mark Twain that give his view of the aridness of the area :
“Stirring senses… occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent — not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings”
or – the now-beautiful area of the Galilee, which sounds like a wasteland in Twain’s time :
“These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of bareness that never, never, never, do shake the glare from their harsh outlines…; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms. … A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. … We reached [Mount] Tabor safely. … We never saw a human being on the whole route.”
But I expect all this goes straight over your head. You simply do not think that Israel should exist at all ?
Thanks for the info, David. Interesting that that first paragraph has been misattributed so often. And incidentally, my original hunch about Twain appears to have been proved correct!
I find it hard to believe you don’t know Twain is American…and therefore spells American.
See above, Alan. He didn’t actually write it…that’s OK, don’t mention it!
According to the way the BBC are reporting events in Gaza, Israel is indiscriminatingly firing on Gaza homes and citizens without regard for life or property.
The BBC also have a slew of reporters in Gaza telling just how bad it is for residents there.
Just how is it they feel so safe reporting from the middle of a war zone?
They don’t do it in Syria, or Iraq, or anywhere else that Islamic factions are vying for power, and if you believe their reports, Israel are massacring civilians in much the same way.
The fact that they know they are safe is proof they know their reports are fictitious.
They are safe from Hamas because Hamas knows they are bolstering support for their agenda.
And they know full well they are safe from the ‘evil’ Israelis.
And never any “interviews” with tearful Jewish people at the end of their tethers with all the Hamas ordinance being lobbed at them.
Why ever not?