Category Archives: pro Hamas

At least 400 BBC employees, goodness knows how many Muslims, Annie Lennox and several MPs declare their abhorrence of Israel ‘for Gaza’. They accept Hamas’s allegations without hesitation or deviation (but with repetition.) Discussions on the BBC reduce the issue to a simple contest; who is the biggest victim, and whose warfare is fair, and whose is a crime.

Squabbling over what is and what is not a war crime, over whether Israel should endure random rocket attacks permanently because retaliation would automatically incur the crime of murdering civilians who were, or were not, imprisoned in an overpopulated hellhole with no way of escaping; disagreeing over white phosphorous, accuracy of targeting, who is a legitimate target and who is a civilian, whether this or that was deliberate or unavoidable, and who is the biggest villain, is a road to nowhere. While all this has been going on front of house, behind the scenes something else has happened.

Slowly but surely, by sleight of hand, the BBC has maneuvered Hamas into the position of graduating by stealth as a fully-fledged legitimate political entity in the eyes of the public. The BBC constantly pleads “talk to Hamas” because not to do so would be churlish, since the BBC has, with its magic trickery, legitimised, normalised and humanised it. There is only one thing worth saying: Recognise Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence, and re-educate your followers. Agreeing to any of that would entail no longer being fundamentalist extremist Islamists, so what’s the use?

The BBC has made up its mind already because it is not concerned with history, geography or a piddly little existential threat.

However many Fitnas or Panoramas we are shown that tell us there is a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and the west, the media still stops short of connecting this, multiplied several times over, with the threat Israel faces. They don’t like terrorism when it rears its head here, but are unable to empathise with what Israel has lived with since 1948.

These arguments obfuscate the real issue, which is: why is Israel fighting? Why is Hamas, fighting? Why are Syria, Iran and other assorted Arab states involved? In this topsy turvy way, by not asking these questions, the BBC has manipulated public opinion to back the wrong horse.

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Let’s be honest – Israel will never get a break on the BBC . The latter is institutionally pro-Palestinian and really struggles to disguise this each time this issue comes up. Earlier this morning, on Today, this was manifest in this item on (Sh)Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel and Hamas of war crimes and demanding an arms embargo against the Israeli state and “armed Palestinian groups”. No surprise there, I think anyone who has familiarity with AI knows that it is profoundly and sickeningly anti-Israeli but what interested me was how the BBC chose to cover this. It gave Gaza correspondent and donkey expert Aleem Maqbool the opportunity to glowingly propagandise on behalf of Hamas painting Israeli forces as homicidal monsters who deliberately target children before then switching to an accusatory interview with Israeli government spokesmen Mark Regev. I thought Regev countered quite well but the James Naughtie seemed a/ Disappointed that Hamas rockets were less effective than Israeli rockets and b/ Determined to ensure that the listener was left with the impression that Israel was the guilty party even when defending itself.

Just a quick alert to all B-BBC readers to have an onion handy when Abu Bowen presents the latest pro-Palestinian lovefest on the BBC. Tune in, if you dare, tomorrow night to Panorama to hear Bowen give a little pre-Israeli election onslaught on the reputation of Israel.

Interesting to read how the BBC presents the news that Hamas has fired more rockets into Israel, in this case landing between two nursery schools in the Eshkol region of southern Israel. The headline is “Israel vows tough rocket response” and launches (if you’ll pardon the pun) into a quote from Ehud Olmert vowing a “disproportionate” response to these “rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza.” Oh, those war mongering Jews! All the time, the BBC chooses to present this as a war between Israel and Gaza. In this way, the savages in Hamas get a free pass. Lord knows how the BBC will react in just over a week’s time when Israel goes to the polls and the prospect of a Netanyahu adminisatration looms! We’ll all be Hamas then!

I see that my old pal George Mitchell and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana are in the Middle East to help “bring peace.” You can expect to see the BBC give the efforts of this pair of jokers a sympathetic hearing – they have always been kind to Senator Mitchell following his work in Northern Ireland. Now that Obama has recycled this Clintonian bagman him into this role I am certain that the BBC will use the Northern Ireland peace process as the preferred template for creating stability in this region. On News 24 last night I heard someone insist that Israel would “have to” talk to Hamas, just like the British government “had to” talk to the IRA. It’s a completely misleading analogy but the BBC are wedded to it and you can be sure that Israel will be cast as the intransigent villains if they do not set down and enter dialogue with the genocidal Islamic savages in Hamas. The BBC coverage of the brutal murder of an Israeli soldier by Hamas should have re-assured everyone that BBC faux protestations about its’ much vaunted “impartiality”on this issue are as shallow as they are insubstantial. Once again the narrative is that “both sides” have broken their cease-fires and so Hamas get a pass for their act of murderous aggression.