Author Archives: Natalie

. Hat tip: Callingallcomets.

Obrador:

One of the most popular politicians in Mexico … It ended in a triumph for him … As mayor of Mexico City, he won respect as much for his reputation for honesty, a gruelling work schedule and his humble lifestyle as for his ambitious public works and social programmes targeting the poor and disadvantaged … He often draws on his humble origins – growing up in a village of 600 in Tabasco State, the son of a store owner… recognition of indigenous people’s rights, scholarships for the handicapped and improving healthcare and education … He says he will pay for social spending, higher pensions and wages by wiping out corruption, cutting down on government waste and cracking down on tax evasion … His anti-capitalist speeches have sent jitters through the business community and his main rival has said he will bankrupt the country. Mr Lopez Obrador, however, insists he will respect private property and foreign business investment.

Calderon:

A Harvard educated lawyer, Mr Calderon, 44, is favoured by the business community ,,,

Since the election result is too close to call it looks like he is favoured by more than just businessmen.

…A career politician … He has run a negative campaign against his left-wing rival, linking him to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez in TV ads proclaiming: “Lopez Obrador is a danger to Mexico”.

The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) eventually banned the ad, despite Mr Calderon’s claim that the move constituted censorship. But Mr Calderon’s showing at the polls has been dented by counter-accusations from Mr Lopez Obrador that he gave contracts to a company part-owned by his brother-in-law while he was energy secretary. Mr Calderon has strongly denied the allegations.

… While Mr Lopez Obrador has pledged to fight crime through social programmes, Mr Calderon has pledged an iron fist approach, with life sentences for kidnappers.

Hat tip to Rachel: CAMERA have featured the same story about Walid Houdaly / Hodali and his wife Ataf Alyan that I did on Thursday. Their story features the same link as I found, saying that far from being “jailed for 12 years for being a political organiser” as the BBC said, Mr Houdaly was jailed for being an attempted kidnapper himself.

I’m not saying that CAMERA got the link from me. Once you had twigged the spelling confusion anyone who was reasonaby patient could have got this information from Google – or, of course, by inquiring more deeply at the time of the interview. The BBC did not do either.

The statement that Mr Houdaly was “jailed for 12 years for being a political organiser” is a misrepresentation of Israeli society. Is it going to be changed?

Hat tip to George (UPDATE and also to dumbcisco), who has pointed out this post from LGF: BBC Prisoner Sob Story Hides Terrorist Facts.

The post refers to this BBC story by Martin Patience, Palestinians back prisoner release call, featuring a Palestinian woman imprisoned by the Israelis. The BBC story simply says, “Mr Houdaly says his wife, Ataf, 44, headed a women’s organisation dedicated to providing health services for poor Palestinians.” LGF says:

Notice that Mr. Houdaly doesn’t say—and the BBC apparently doesn’t care—why his wife is imprisoned. They don’t even tell us her full name.

You have to search Google’s cache to find out who his wife really is, and why she’s in an Israeli jail, but it’s very probable that this man’s wife is an Islamic Jihad terrorist who planned to execute a suicide bombing by detonating a car bomb in Jerusalem in 1987, and was jailed for 10 years.

Charles Johnson of LGF then provides links.

Quite apart from the wife, what of the husband? The BBC story says,

Mr Houdaly knows more than most about imprisonment.

Apart from his wife, Mr Houdaly was himself jailed for 12 years for being a political organiser.

To me, that statement cries out for some supplementary questions. What sort of politics, exactly? Did your charge sheet actually say “being a political organiser”, Mr Houdaly? Did Mr Houdaly’s charge sheet actually say “being a political organiser”, Mr Israeli Government Spokesman?

UPDATE: I went looking myself. I found enough to convince me that the usual transcription of Mr Houdaly’s name is Walid al-Hodali. This article by Gideon Levy, in French, made me more sympathetic to both Mr and Mrs Hodali. It says that they had promised each other never again to get involved in the activities that got them into prison.

But what was he imprisoned for? Gideon Levy’s article is coy, diminishing my burst of sympathy. It only says, “Les années 1990-2002, Walid Hodali les a passées dans une prison israélienne, pour atteintes à la sécurité pendant la première Intifada.” That means “undermining security during the first Intifada.” I kept looking.

According to this link from the French language site of the Palestine Information Centre:

The authorities of the “Israeli” occupation freed a leader of Hamas after fifteen years of captivity.
June 24, 2005, 01:10

Ramallah – CPI

The “Israeli” occupation authorities have freed on Wednesday the leader of the Hamas movement Sheikh Sami Yousef Hussein, a resident of the Jalazon refugee camp in the village of Ramallah, after fifteen years in captivity.

The inhabitants of the camp organised a big party to receive the liberated Sheik at the entrance to the camp and brandished green banners and Palestinian flags.

Sheikh Sami was arrested on 4 February 1990, accused of being a member of the armed wing of Hamas and of having attempted to kidnap a soldier in order to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners, in cooperation with Sheikh Fuad Al-Hodali and his brother Walid.

Emphasis and translation mine. If Mr Hodali was himself a would-be kidnapper of an Israeli soldier, that is something I would expect to be told by the BBC when hearing about his feelings as the husband of a woman imprisoned by the Israelis – particularly when what prompted the story was the kidnapping of another Israeli soldier.

UPDATE: Google cache of same story in English here.

UPDATE: Gideon Levy article about Walid Hodali in English here.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

“Violence before diplomacy in Gaza”, says the BBC.

Violence moves faster than negotiation. Now that Israel has its tanks in Gaza, military force will drown out everything else until Prime Minister Ehud Olmert decides that his business there is done.

“Now that Israel has its tanks in Gaza…” Everything was just peachy before? Two Israeli soldiers were killed and one was kidnapped in a totally non-violent manner?

Standard stuff. But this next bit is just so weird.

Palestinians feel very uncomfortable about splits, and are always conscious of the pressure and power radiating from Israel.

Palestinians, you see, are like Counsellor Troi, only not with that dress.

Captain, I sense a great mass of … Israelis – the pressure – the power, radiating out – I can’t bear it…

• Two handfuls. First off, hat tip to USS Neverdock. Hat particularly tipped because I nearly got this one myself. On Tuesday morning I saw a story on Ceefax saying that demonstrations against rendition flights at Scottish airports have attracted “just a handful of protesters”. I was, I really was, going to do a quick post praising the BBC. We have often complained here that titchy demos get disproportionate coverage so long as they are for favoured BBC causes, and here was an example of a titchy demo for a favoured BBC cause being reported as titchy. Only when I looked again the story was different. I hadn’t written anything down, and, you know how it is, ordinary life intervened and the post never got done.

  However USS Neverdock followed the same story on the web, and has screenshots.

  Incidentally, 30 demonstrators at one airport and six at another is still titchy.

• “A life in power” indeed. An anonymous commenter writes:
  

  Beeb’s puff piece on Kenneth Kaunda:

  Kenneth Kaunda: A life in power

  A more balanced account from Wikipedia here:

  Kenneth Kuanda

  To the point.

• Max comments regarding this story: Israel soldier’s family wait for news .
  

  After misspelling the name of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit as ‘Shilat’ no less than seven times in the same article, the BBC’s Martin ‘I take cookery class lessons from terrorists’ Patience inserts a bit of agenda:

  “A mayor from a nearby Palestinian village paid a visit to the family to show his support.”

  Since there are no Palestinian villages nearby, one has to assume that Martin ‘Israeli drones would love to see what I can see’ Patience might refer to the Christian Arab village of Me’ilya (not sure if it’s spelled correctly in English) 2 kilometers down the road from Mitspe Hilla – where he’s ‘reporting’ from. For BBC reporters Arab Israeli citizens are Palestinians. Also, he doesn’t bother to identify this village by name; too difficult to spell I suppose.

  Then again I guess that for someone who writes that “Gilad’s older brother, a university student in the nearby city of Haifa [approx. 60 kilometers away]..” accuracy is not a priority.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

And make sure you do – lots of good stuff posted in the last 24 hours!

to anyone other than the rapist prompted paragraph headings such as “disturbing attitudes” when the BBC reported on the Amnesty survey of attitudes towards rape. (My personal view on the subject of responsibility for rape can be read here.)

Hat tip to Grimer, who has pointed out an example of the BBC being less clear about ascribing responsibility for rape to the rapists. Grimer writes:

Stop Press!

EU and USA responsible for rape of of Palestinians (according to the BBC)

Rape in war ‘a growing problem’

Sexual violence has also been linked to development funding. Cases in Gaza and the West Bank have increased significantly since the EU and the US cut funding after January’s election of Hamas, Luay Shabaneh of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics says.

So, because we’ve stopped giving them billions in aid, they are now raping each other. How quaint.

I think Grimer has somewhat overstated his case, although I have no doubt that this was overstatement was conscious and rhetorical. One aspect of the BBC climate of opinion that I have no quarrel with is its sincere abhorrence of rape. Still, feminist writers (who also sometimes use rhetorical overstatement) have pointed out that separately trivial forms of words can combine to harmful effect.

“Sexual violence has also been linked to development funding.”

Google the phrase “rape culture” and you will find many writers who would say that words such as those support a culture that excuses rape. I don’t agree – it is legitimate to raise the hypothesis of “links” between incidence of rape and other variables. But I think it likely that that particular possible link (rape to development funding) was especially congenial to the BBC, despite being so indirect. Otherwise why did the BBC not focus on another possible link, more direct, more plausible and equally implicit in the article’s own words. You can see this link by cutting out seven words from the paragraph quoted above. What is left is still a true statement.

Cases in Gaza and the West Bank have increased significantly … after January’s election of Hamas.

Read this post from Classical Values, “Hamas honors women!” on the attitudes of Palestinian society towards women who have been raped – attitudes exacerbated by the electoral victory of Hamas.

Anthropologist James Emery explained in 2003, how “among Palestinians, all sexual encounters, including rape and incest, are blamed on the woman.” Men are always presumed innocent and the responsibility falls on the woman or girl to protect her honor at all costs. When 17-year-old Afaf Younes ran away from her father after he allegedly sexually assaulted her, she was caught and sent home to him. He then shot and killed her to protect his honor.

That case and others like it happened when the EU’s development funding was in full flow. I hope the BBC takes a more questioning attitude to statements by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics next time.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

I have had several emails saying that people are getting the message that they have been banned from comments.

Count yourselves lucky! Right now I myself can’t see any comments at all. Obviously there is some hiccup with the system. I’m seeking technical advice.

If you get the banned message, please email me with your IP address so we can investigate the problem. You can get your IP address here or here. If I get hundreds of emails I’ll cancel this request.

Update by Andrew: ‘Invisible’ comments problem fixed – a minor templating glitch that affected Internet Explorer. Sorry. For those still using IE, you may wish to consider downloading Firefox – it’s widely considered to be a better browser, what with tabbed browsing, all those useful add-ons and so on. It’s easy to setup – just download it and run the installer, and you can still use IE if you want to.

Update at 9pm: For those experiencing commenting problems earlier, please try again. If you still have trouble, email your IP address to me at biasedbbc AT gmail.com. For those who manage comments with Haloscan, you may be interested to know that you can use ‘regular expressions‘ (but without the ‘\’ escape character) to define banned ranges – a big improvement over Haloscan’s documented features.

Update at 3am: Have worked on ‘unbreaking’ whatever it was that broke the ‘new comments’ thing. I think it’s fixed – let me know if you spot anything unusual. Everything will be unread when you first view this page. Comment totals are taking a few minutes to update after comments are posted – I think this is a Haloscan issue as this lag isn’t new.