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Anorak News | The BBC’s Anti-Israel Bias And Support For Unconventional Hamas

The BBC’s Anti-Israel Bias And Support For Unconventional Hamas

by | 30th, December 2008

IS the BBC biased against Israel. Well, yes, it is. Take this from the corporation’s Jeremy Bowen:

Israeli generals always assume that two clocks start when they go into action. The first shows the time they need to achieve their military objectives. The second shows the amount of time left before international pressure for a ceasefire becomes impossible to resist.

The diplomatic clock speeds up with the number of deaths, of civilians especially. With so many Palestinians dead already, the clock is ticking loudly.

And then the clincher:

Hamas is a less conventional organisation.

It is very conventional – it wants to kill Israelis and destroy the country. This from paragraph 2 of the Hamas charter:

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”

Says Bowen of Israel:

It has powerful, modern armed forces. That does not mean that a standard military victory is assured. If it was, Israel would have gone to war before now.

Well, yes. And it would have won. But that clock would be ticking, Jeremy. And at 10 ‘clock, the clock goes bong:

Winning the media battle in a world of non-stop, instant communication is a big part of winning the war.

So are the Israeli generals listening to the media? Here’s Bowen of the laptop corps.:

For Palestinians, whatever Israel says about pinpoint attacks, this feels like an assault on everyone.

That’s the BBC. Take this from a Palestinian TV report:

[Girl] “We were sleeping 7 girls in the room. We were asleep and didn’t know what was happening. In the morning all the bricks were on top of my head, and the heads of all my sisters. My 4 year old sister next to me was dead.”
[Interviewer] “How many were you?”
[Girl] “Seven.In the other room were my mother, my father, my yonger brother and another sister, who is 13 days old. I say, Hamas is the cause, in the first place, of all wars.

Stringer Hamada Abu Qammar reports on the same incident for the BBC:

“I was sleeping with my sisters and suddenly I woke up,” Reem Baloosha, 13, told me, describing the night two days ago when her five sisters were killed in an Israeli air strike.

“I found myself under the rubble, the stones were crushing me. I looked around, my sister was under the rubble, she was dead.” I visited the family in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip.

As she says:

…the BBC persistently refer to “Israel’s attacks” on a “Palestinian militant group.” First, Israel is responding to unfaltering attacks, amounting to more than 6,300 rockets and mortars on Israeli citizens, since Israel left Gaza in 2005. Second, the ‘militant group’ are Hamas. Not a militant group in terms of a unified national army, but, an internationally recognised terrorist organisation who have taken control of the Gaza strip.

And why is Israel the lead news story, always? Elsewhere on the BBC, buried deep inside the reportage is this:

“More than 400 people have been killed by Ugandan rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo in attacks since Christmas day, aid agency Caritas says.

No Jews. No news. No Arab market for the BBC to tap into…



Posted: 30th, December 2008 | In: Reviews Comments (19) | TrackBack | Permalink