Note…Graphic photos of death.
The BBC Middle East crew are ratcheting up the propaganda that paints the Israelis as living in a safe haven of bomb shelters, protected from puny and ineffective, makeshift Palestinian rockets by the ‘Iron Dome’ missile system and with a sophisticated, powerful, savage army that brutally enforces the siege of Gaza and targets civilians…or cares less whether they become casualties or not.
The repeated assertion on most reports on the aftermath of Gaza are that the Israelis just didn’t really suffer, not enough dead, not enough wounded, not enough homes wrecked….the Palestinians are the ‘victims’ of an Israel murderous over reaction.
I wonder how Bowen & Co would react if yobs started lobbing some form of explosive at his home and family and demanded to be allowed to live in his house….and kept it up for 60 years. I’m sure he would just walk away and hand them the keys.
Jeremy Bowen (abridged) on the Today programme on Friday (2 hrs 49 mins) lays it on thick from Gaza…..and interesting choice of ‘witness’…Mads Gilbert….more of whom later….
Jon Donnison follows with a piece on the Website doing a similar job…interesting change of spelling of the name of his Palestinian colleague whose son was killed….all spellings I have seen have been ‘Jihad’, Donnison spells it ‘Jehad’…..
Checking Donnison’s Twitter feed it was always ‘jihad’…why the change all of a sudden?
Jon Donnison @JonDonnison
Jihad Mashrrawi: And tell them I am okay & I have durability & have the patience. I hope to you and to everyone have peace & love. #Gaza 3/3
Bowen:
‘A very peaceful scene…a modest, dusty park in the centre of Gaza…so different to how it was not so long ago.
This has been the first big clash between the Israelis and Palestinians since the Arab Spring started two years ago.
Israel still has its Western friends but Hamas, with its important allies, claims to be the real leader of the Palestinians instead of the Western backed Fatah and is looking much more credible.
[Good that Bowen thinks a murderous terrorist group set on destroying Israel and has just blown up a civilian bus in Tel Aviv is ‘credible’].
Every morning some Palestinian families had to dig through the ruins of their homes to find dead children or parents. I spoke to a man who was watching cousins, nephews and neighbours, tearing through the rubble, some with shovels some with their bare hands….he said to me that when a boy’s mother or father is killed the boy will seek revenge for the killing.
I spoke to Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon at Gaza’s main hospital minutes after he tried and failed to resuscitate a 13 year old Palestinian boy who’d been rushed in with a shrapnel wound in the chest.
Mr Gilbert was infuriated by the way that Western countries tend to support Israel’s version of events… “I feel between rage and desperation, between screaming and crying. This little Shabab is now dead….and the only crime in his life is that he was born Palestinian in Gaza, he hasn’t done anything wrong and nobody really speaks up for him. I think this needs to be addressed in a way that the fundamental right of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza is being completely deserted by all these governments.”
Gaza has a lot more damage and a lot more casualties than Israel …..every death, every wound, every wrecked house is some bodies tragedy where ever it happens.’
So Mads Gilbert? A good choice of witness? Even the Guardian recognises he is somewhat pro-Palestinian and even pro-terrorist…
‘Gilbert, 61, and his colleague Erik Fosse, 58, recently returned to Oslo after working in Gaza for the first 10 days of the Israeli offensive [Cast Lead 2009].
The pair are high-profile pro-Palestinian campaigners and Gilbert, a far-left politician in Norway, is a particularly controversial figure, having been at the centre of allegations – which he says are “completely absurd” – of faking a TV report about the death of an 11-year-old boy during the conflict.’
Foxnews tells us a lot more:
A high-profile Norwegian doctor who has said the September 11 terrorists were justified in their attack is now treating patients in Gaza and is being accused of presenting “hard-core propaganda” to TV interviewers in his telling of the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
In addition to being supportive of the terrorist organization Hamas, Gilbert has voiced support for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“The oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with.”
When asked if he supported a terror attack on the U.S., Gilbert said, “Terror is a bad weapon but the answer is yes within the context which I have mentioned.”
Dr. Mads Gilbert has become an unofficial advocate of the Palestinian cause, his critics say.
International media reports, including those from the BBC, CBS, CNN and FOX’s sister station Sky News, present Gilbert as an ordinary doctor.
But a look at his record shows that Gilbert, 61, is a political activist and member of the Norwegian Maoist “Red” party, and he has been involved in solidarity work for the Palestinians since the 1970s. He has criticized the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders for refusing to take sides in conflicts.
Israeli government officials have said Hamas hides weapons in the hospital where Gilbert works.’
Here the BBC’s Jon Donnison attempts to pile on the pressure and tries to demonise Israel……no such stories for the Fogels…remember them:
They ended up like this:
By Jon Donnison
(BBC Watch have also picked up on this report: BBC’s Jon Donnison displays a professional and ethical conflict of interests )
‘My friend and colleague Jehad Mashhrawi is usually the last to leave our Gaza bureau. Hard-working but softly spoken, he often stays late, beavering away on a laptop that is rarely out of arm’s reach.
But on the Wednesday before last – only an hour or so after Gaza’s latest war erupted with Israel’s killing of Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari – Jehad burst out of the editing suite screaming.
He sprinted down the stairs, his head in his hands, his face ripped with anguish.
He had just had a call from a friend to tell him the Israeli military had bombed his house and that his 11-month-old baby boy Omar was dead.
Jehad showed me a photo on his mobile phone.
It was of a cheeky, chunky, round-faced little boy in denim dungarees, chuckling in a pushchair, dark-eyed with a fringe of fine brown hair pushed across his brow.
“He only knew how to smile,” Jehad told me, as we both struggled to hold back the tears.
“He could say just two words – Baba and Mama,” his father went on.
Also on Jehad’s phone is another photo. A hideous tiny corpse. Omar’s smiling face virtually burnt off, that fine hair appearing to be melted on to his scalp.
Omar was not a terrorist.
Of course every civilian death on either side – not just Omar’s – is tragic. The United Nations says its preliminary investigation shows that 103 of the 158 people killed in Gaza were civilians.
Of those, 30 were children – 12 of whom were under the age of 10. More than 1,000 people were injured.
In Israel, too, there were fatalities: four civilians and two soldiers. There were also many injuries. But the fact the Israeli Ambulance Service was also reporting those suffering from anxiety and bruises is an indication of the asymmetric nature of the conflict.‘
The difference with the Fogel family and the Palestinian civilian casulaties is that the Fogels were murdered deliberately and in cold blood. The Israelis were not ‘targeting’ civilians in Gaza….every death is somebody’s personal tragedy….but deaths caused as a consequence of otherwise legitimate actions happen all the time…in police chases, at work or on the roads….how many in Britain die from traffic accidents? Three thousand or so? And yet you jump into your car every day and think nothing of it….and yet, by driving, in essence you are that Israeli ‘tank commander’ or ‘pilot’ who has to fire a tank shell or a missile to deal with the Hamas military threat….you too could kill someone..by accident. They are still dead, accident or not and you killed them.
I would suggest that the BBC correspondents are becoming far too emotionally involved in this conflict…especially when a colleague’s son is killed, to report in a balanced and impartial manner….the effect is to demonise Israel which is presented as the ‘aggressor’ whose intent is to wipe out the Palestinians and take their land.
I believe Bowen was promoted up to remove him from temptation and limit his direct involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict after the Balen Report…clearly those limits have been breached and he has once again been allowed to air his own, partial take on events…and now ably assisted by Jon Donnison….the only mercy is that the ‘Angel of Death’, Orla Guerin, is kept safely out of the mix….‘They used to call war reporter Orla Guerin the Angel of Death because every time she went anywhere people started being murdered’.….except very often they weren’t…she invented or happily quoted reliable Palestian sources….see Jenin and the 3000 Palestinians ‘massacred’, or not, by the Israelis.
Update:
Having had a look at previous notes on Donnison and the ‘asymmetry’ of this war as well as child deaths it looks like Donnison is continuing a theme as this report from 2011 shows:
‘Militarily, Israel is far superior, a fact which is reflected in the casualty figures.
Israel, where casualties are rare, is under pressure from its border communities to punish militants in Gaza for any attacks.‘
It might also be as well to remember that the BBC fall over themselves to give a platform to Tariq Ramadan (‘one of the most influential voices on young Muslims’) the slippery Islamist…the man who claimed it was justifiable to deliberately kill Jewish children in a ‘war’.
Here is the full transcript (from Italian magazine Panorama in 2004) of his answer to the question of whether it is right to deliberately target and kill children and Israeli civilians because they are considered soldiers.
‘I don’t believe that an eight year old child is a soldier. These acts are condemnable; therefore one has to condemn them in themselves. But I say to the international community that they are contextually explicable, and not justifiable. What does this mean? It means that the international community today has placed the Palestinians in a situation where they are delivered political oppression, which explains (not justifying it) that at a certain point people say: we don’t have arms, we don’t have anything, and so we cannot do anything other than this. It is contextually explicable but morally condemnable.’
So in the context killing Jewish children is justifiable if morally wrong.
Ramadan is an Islamist….and just as the BBC do not explain Dr Mads Gilbert’s political ideology they choose not to explain the ‘real’ Tariq Ramadan….a hardline ‘Salafist’……
‘In a 2003 radio interview, Ramadan made clear his adherence to the salafist teachings: “There is a rationalist Reformism and the Salafist school, in the sense that the Salafist tries to remain faithful to the basic principles. I belong to the latter; that is to say, there is a certain number of principles that are for me, fundamental, and that, as a Muslim, I refuse to betray.”
The theoretical foundation for his concept of Europe as a space for the relatively unfettered propagation of Islam was developed in the 1980s by the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood activist Faisal Mawlawi
Mawlawi describes dawa as one part or aspect of jihad, which he defines in a comprehensive way as the overall struggle to expand Islam. From this comprehensive perspective, he argues that jihad may not be reduced to armed struggle simply (although he does claim this is permitted in certain contexts), and further argues that armed fighting should not be pursued if circumstances allow for the peaceful spread of Islam by dawa.
He emphasizes on the one hand that periods of peace are more conducive to the spread of Islam than fighting, and that it is preferable to spread Islam by peaceful dawa, on the other hand he declares that fighting is permitted when the order for jihad is given, and even may become a duty if the ‘message of Islam’ can not be spread other than by fighting against un-Islamic rulers.
Ramadan does not see Muslim identity and European identity as mutually exclusive. He claims that today Muslims are already Europeans and calls indigenous people “just older immigrants,” thus providing a way of introducing Islam to non-Muslims as something familiar, and not a foreign, alien element.‘
Jon Donnison 
