Bearing Witness

 

Jon Snow  grandly, sententiously, told us he was ‘bearing witness’ to events in Gaza rather than reporting them in  a balanced and impartial manner.  Never mind the facts, the context, the causes of those events that Snow ‘bears witness’ to.

The BBC’s Archive on 4, Media and the Middle East, programme opened with Snow’s words.

And it went downhill from there as it explored how the Israel/Palestinian conflict has been reported….or at least that is how the programme was presented to us.

In fact this was a self serving piece of very, very carefully crafted BBC propaganda designed to tell us the BBC is not pro-Israeli and its seemingly pro-Palestinian stance is merely a just rebalancing of the media narrative which has been too heavily slanted towards ‘plucky’ little Israel.

The programme had two very revealing conclusions.  Firstly they told us that neither Israeli nor Hamas social media operations caught the Public imagination.  What did catch that imagination were the casualties in Gaza.

Now Hamas might consider that their social media offensive failing is hardly a disaster when they had a massive, powerful, respected, world wide broadcasting organisation such as the BBC pumping out their message for them…the exact message that Hamas were trying to generate…that of high civilian casualties.

In other words what caught the public’s attention was the Hamas message, courtesy of the BBC…and this was a deliberate BBC policy, carried out to the nth degree by the likes of Jon Donnison….undoubtedly overseen approvingly by his boss, Jeremy Bowen.

 

The second conclusion was that the narrative about Israel has changed over time…once the plucky little country fighting for survival, now the enormously powerful bully turning its might upon a weak and defenceless People who could barely fight back.

Now again that’s a narratve that is familiar…it is one we have heard repeatedly from BBC journalists, that Israel’s overwhelmingly powerful army is crushing a helpless, defenceless Palestinian opponent.

So once again the BBC has worked to completely alter the narrative of the conflict and has managed to create an image of Israel that bears little relation to the truth, missing out important context and causation…never mind that Israel is surrounded by enemies out to destroy it.

Curiously the BBC is far more sympathetic to Iran whom it explains is only so aggressive because of the enemies (The Great Satan) surrounding it.

 

From those two conclusions we can see just how powerful and effective the BBC’s attempts to manipulate the narrative in favour of the Palestinians and against the Israelis has been.

By coincidence this morning we also heard something about ISIS and what needs to be done to tackle and lessen its appeal to Muslims. The main answer, we were told, was to create functioning, decent states, societies and democracies in the Middle East.

Which, you may recall, is what was attempted in Iraq. What was the main obstacle on the road to a democratic, just State in Iraq?  The radical Islamists…..and who encouraged them to fight in Iraq?  The BBC….the BBC ‘fought’ the Iraq war all the way, declaring it illegal, Blair a liar and the army murderous.

The BBC was one of the obstacles to that fair and just State as it spent a decade pumping out anti-Iraq war messages that ensured Muslims were in a perpetual state of anger and anti-Western funk.

Once again the BBC has interfered in the Middle East with devastatingly dangerous consequences.

 

The programme seemed to concentrate more on Israel than the Palestinians or Arabs…..the clips played were all unfavourable to Israel, or intended that way.

We heard Pathe News was terribly pro-Israel…apparently the soundtracks accompanying the reports of Israeli victories in the various wars were far too triumphant ….personally, having heard many a Pathe News film clip, I’d say they were about standard for the time…nothing that would indicate it was intedned to be pro-Israel.

We heard that the BBC was at the mercy of the ‘Jewish Lobby’….a view later reinforced when Bowen came on to claim he was bombarded by complaints…..mostly as a result of orchestrated Jewish campaigns against him and the BBC….oh, yes the Palestinians also complained…but you know what, it was just that terrible old Arafat……not the lovely Hamas…nor the Palestinian people.

What we didn’t hear from Bowen was how his journalists were controlled by Hamas and the reports they sent out were censored by the terrorists…..something which the BBC of course denies.

Those were the most notable points from the programme which overall was just as you might expect…Israel in the wrong and the defenceless Palestinians doing the best they can in a cruel world.

But essentially as said, this was more about the BBC than about either Israel or the Palestinians.

 

A couple other notable points…one claim was that the UK was very pro-Israel as a bulwark against Arab nationalism….hmmm…well Britain was never enthusiastically pro-Israel and favoured the Arabs far more….not to mention the British long term support for the Muslim Brotherhood….as a bulwark against Arab nationalism….something the BBC fails to mention here for some reason.

One of John Lloyd’s final comments was that social media played no part in the ‘Arab Spring’…which is curious as that was a central theme for much of the BBC reporting at the time….the BBC itself being chastised for its casual use of the social media sources for ‘news’.

Interesting how the Arab Spring is now being quietly downgraded itself….could it be that the BBC prefers to lay the blame for the rise of massive unrest in the Middle East on the doorstep of the Americans and Blair after Iraq 2003?….which is odd really…as the BBC told us this:

“We had a clean revolution [In Tunisia]. The former president turned out to be a coward. He just ran away. Not like the others – like the poor Libyans, or in Syria – but it lit the fuse to all the other revolutions” Wassim Herissi, radio DJ

The downfall of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali inspired pro-democracy activists across the Arab world.
Widespread discontent at economic hardship, decades of autocratic rule and corruption erupted into mass demonstrations in December 2010 after a young, unemployed man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set fire to himself after officials stopped him selling vegetables in Sidi Bouzid. Around 300 people were killed during the subsequent unrest, which forced Ben Ali to resign in January 2011, after 23 years in power, and go into exile in Saudi Arabia. He was later sentenced to life in prison in absentia.

Not the Iraq war then?  And ISIS?  It came out of the Arab Spring and Syria.  Again not from Iraq 2003.

It’s also interesting to hear all those Syrians and Iraqis who are proud of their countries and who intend to fight to keep them in one piece…..not a message the BBC likes, preferring instead to tell us that Sykes-Picot forced diverse ethnicities and religions unnaturally together, a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode…never mind the Ottoman Empire was constructed from all those various identities itself…and that the Arabs fought to create an Arab nation alongside the British against the Islamic Caliphate.

 

The BBC… which never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.