Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: bbc

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Sunday, April 23, 2017

BBC shows clear anti-Israel bias in justification for using "terror" term for UK attack

The BBC used the word "terror" without scare quotes to describe the March attack on Westminster Bridge.

The BBC had no compunctions about using the term "terror" even before the attacker was identified and before any motive was known.

Neil Turner complained to the BBC about why they consider this attack to be terrorism and not the many terror attacks against Israel.

The answer is illuminating, but not in the way the BBC intended:

Thank you for getting in touch about our report on the attack carried out on Westminster Bridge in London and please accept our apologies for the delay in our response.

The BBC sets out clear parameters on how terms such as "terrorist" might be used:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidance/terrorism-language/guidance-full

Where there is an ongoing geopolitical conflict - as in the Middle East - to use the term "terror attack" or similar might be seen to be taking sides. There are those who might consider the actions of the Israeli government to be considered as terrorist acts.

In a situation where a country that is not involved in a direct physical combat comes under attack, it may be reasonable to construe that as a terrorist incident.

The use of such terminology is never an exact science but where a continuing conflict exists, it is reasonable that the BBC would not wish to appear to be taking sides.

Thank you again for raising this matter.

The BBC explanation that "There are those who might consider the actions of the Israeli government to be considered as terrorist acts" as justification for this policy is simple hypocrisy.

Many of those same people would also consider British airstrikes in the Middle East to be terrorism as well, so what's the difference?

There is no logic to saying that attacking Israeli civilians is not terrorism but attacking British civilians is terrorism simply because Israel happens to be located in the Middle East.

The hypocrisy doesn't end there. This explanation is at odds with the BBC's own guidelines. The link that the BBC points to makes no such distinction between whether the location of an attack is in a conflict zone or not. On the contrary, it says that reporters should avoid using the term as much as possible altogether:

We try to avoid the use of the term "terrorist" without attribution. When we do use the term we should strive to do so with consistency in the stories we report across all our services and in a way that does not undermine our reputation for objectivity and accuracy.

The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should convey to our audience the full consequences of the act by describing what happened. We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent", and "militant". We should not adopt other people's language as our own; our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.

The guidelines conclude "This is an issue of judgement. If you do decide to use the word 'terrorist' do so sparingly, having considered what is said above, and take advice from senior editors."

By their own standards, the Westminster Bridge incident should not have been referred to as terrorism, especially before a suspect and possible motive was uncovered.

Which means that "senior editors" have made up this new arbitrary rule about how attacks in Israel are not terror while potentially random attacks in Britain are, and they justify it by using their own anti-Israel bias claiming that Israeli military action can be considered terrorist while (by implication) identical British military actions cannot be given that title.

The BBC's use of the word "terrorist" in this case and its justification for the term in near-contradiction to its own published guidelines shows fairly clear anti-Israel bias.

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The BBC notices a different Arab lobby - but stops short

In a comment to my earlier story on the New York Times noticing the Arab lobby in America, Jed G notes a BBC piece about how Arab governments try to influence British journalism:

Over the past two months, as unrest spread across the Middle East, from Tunisia to Bahrain, many Western journalists were discreetly contacted by PR agencies acting for Arab leaders trying desperately to stem the flow of negative headlines.

The UK has become a global centre for this kind of international PR.

London is becoming a global hub for governments and world leaders - some of them with very questionable human rights records - who want to give their reputations in the west a bit of a facelift.

"I would imagine that all of those (countries) are represented in some way or another by a UK-based PR agency," Nick Allan told me in one of Soho's most exclusive clubs, as I showed him a list of Arab states that included Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Nick Allan spent 20 years working for Britain's Foreign Office. Now he is an independent PR consultant. Although he does not currently represent any foreign governments, he has in the past had to deal with what he calls "difficult regimes".

"The key is to change the narrative about that regime. So you can't change the fact that it's a dictatorship, there's only so much lipstick you can put on a dictator, but you can certainly try to change the narrative by pointing to as many positives as you can."

In practice, Mr Allan says, the work would include drafting and placing articles in newspapers, introducing journalists to members of the government in question, or organising trips to that country. Often the PR agency will also try to squash negative stories.

"Quite often what you're doing is just pure damage limitation. There's an article in the press that your client doesn't like, and they are screaming at you down the phone to 'close the story down', do whatever you can to make the story go away.

"A lot of PR agencies will employ media lawyers to do exactly this: to write to the editors, to put as much pressure as possible on the editor or the newspaper to not run the story."

The picture that is being painted is not pretty. We see that people are being paid by foreign governments to write their own articles in newspapers, presuambly without identifying their ties to their unsavory employers they are defending.

Even worse, we are seeing that these same PR agencies are hiring lawyers to threaten newspapers to pull stories that would make Arab dictators look bad.

In other words, they are doing everything they can to limit freedom of the press and transparency.

This is an important article, one that helps explain the incredible bias in UK journalism. But it is missing a key component - a component that makes one think that the problem is even worse than is being reported.

Why didn't the BBC reporter interview anyone from the BBC who has gotten pressured by these PR firms?

It is one thing to interview someone who (says that in the past he) applied pressure to tilt news stories towards his clients' viewpoints. But why not go into the BBC newsroom and find real reporters and editors and publishers who admit that they changed their stories in reaction to outside PR pressure?

This is a story about the media that doesn't bother to interview anyone from the media. Instead, it treats the PR firms as if they are the only ones who have to answer for their unethical behavior.

Certainly the reporter could have shielded the names of the journalists who succumbed to bribes, or threats, or more subtle forms of pressure. But that is the story, and the BBC completely missed the boat in framing it as only being about PR firms taking money from less than ideal clients.

The BBC can start by identifying its own offenders. And if they claim they have never given in to Arab pressure, let's hear examples of what failed.

The consumers of British news media deserve to know the truth about how the news is created and spun. By deflecting the argument, this story looks more like a whitewash of journalists than real journalism.

BBC Panorama special on the Mavi Marmara - plus

Here's the BBC program on the Mavi Marmara.

And here is a MEMRI report on the MM, where interviewees use the word "captive" to describe how they were holding the IDF soldiers and also describing the IHH "peace activists" as the "resistance."

(Also, how unfortunate that they weren't tortured in Israel!)

(h/t Middle East News Watch)

BBC looks at Mavi Marmara

The BBC will have a documentary on the Mavi Marmara incident tonight.

Two clips are on its website:

Turk Cevdet Kiliclar, one of nine activists killed on a Gaza-bound aid mission, was prepared to become a martyr for the Palestinian cause, his wife has said.

Mr Kiliclar's widow, Derya, said: "He was crying his eyes out over Gaza. He wanted to be a martyr there."

Israel's elite commando unit which raided a Turkish aid flotilla sailing to Gaza in May has given Panorama exclusive access to its top secret operatives.

Some of the Israeli special forces took off their balaclavas to talk to me and show me the wounds they received the night nine people were killed and 50 were wounded on board the Turkish ship the MV Mavi Marmara.

"I saw a knife in my abdomen and pulled it out," Captain R said.

"The beating was continuous - and the cries of Allah Akbar."

(h/t Islamo-Nazism blog)

The BBC's endemic bias against Israel bias (Zvi)

Zvi comments in response to my post on BBC bias yesterday:

The BBC Mideast department has an extreme anti-Israel bias, which gets injected into every story that they write about Israel and which shows up strikingly in the headlines and story selection on their web page.

I once did a a non-scientific study based on their headline word selection ("war crime", "massacre", etc.), active accusations against specific parties vs. passive voice headlines, and to an extent, story selection. Essentially, I was trying to determine whether the bias that I perceived was in fact a general bias against the region, or a specific bias against Israel. I assigned numerical values to headlines based on such criteria. After tracking the site for months, it was apparent that there was a strong, constant bias against Israel by the mideast dept. There were only a handful of positive headlines in all that time, and most were attached to stories that were apparently written by other departments (sports, science, medicine, for instance). There was a less extreme bias against Iran. There was distinct bias in favor of Saudi Arabia. Egypt was mostly mentioned in headlines only in the context of accidents. Iraq was a bloody mess at the time, but was usually portrayed as a victim. The Palestinians were nearly always shown in a positive light. If Hamas did something wrong, its actions were nearly always anonymized in the headlines, or the headlines talked about Israel's responses rather than the attacks that caused them.

A much simpler selection bias that I've noted relates to THE BIG PICTURE image on the Mideast page. This one does not require a lot of effort to track, but of course it only provides one data point out of many. Following the BIG PICTURE images since their inception, the number that humanized Israeli Jews is vanishingly small. There are numerous pics that show Arabs, especially Palestinian kids. When Israel pictures are included, they seem to focus on either Israeli Arabs, Israeli soldiers or (bizarrely) animals in Israeli zoos.

And you have only to read the BBC's Shalit FAQ to understand that there is a strong bias here against Israel - strong enough to ignore an unabashed war crime, strong enough to ignore the non-Palestinian roots of the Army of Islam and the fact that they kidnapped Alan Johnston and held him for ransom, strong enough to focus on bashing Israel rather than on the topic that the FAQ purportedly explains, strong enough to completely ignore the strong human elements of the Shalit story and claim that the situation is only important because "Israel is a highly militarized society" etc.

The consistent pattern is that the BBC avoids humanizing Israeli victims. It only humanizes their attackers. It avoids humanizing Israeli soldiers, preferring to accuse them of war crimes.

I would love to find out that the BBC has read this and, in order to prove me wrong, evened out the bias.

But it won't happen.

The BBC has hypocritically, and with extreme prejudice, prevented a report on its culture of anti-Israel bias from being read by the public who fund the BBC.

The BBC Shalit FAQ is indeed remarkable, in that the entire medium-sized article is oriented to bashing Israel. It goes into some detail on supposed Israeli disproportionate reactions to Shalit's capture and not a word about the many violations of international law that Hamas has committed concerning Shalit: taking a hostage, not allowing the Red Cross to visit, using him for propaganda purposes, not allowing regular mail communication, and violating the right to know his location, to name a few. The fact that an article purportedly meant to be a definitive backgrounder about Shalit ignores his own human rights and the war crimes that the Gaza government has committed concerning him speaks volumes about how the BBC perceives the Middle East.

BBC bias in report on Gaza girl

I mentioned earlier today that Israel quickly acceded to a Hamas minister's request to help save his daughter's life.

The BBC tries mightily to spin it negatively towards Israel. Here is its background material for the story:

Israel imposed a blockade on the coastal enclave when it came under control of the Islamist Hamas in 2007.
Its 1.5m inhabitants are rarely allowed to leave.
The UN and a number of international humanitarian groups warned in January that the blockade was putting residents' health at risk.

The last sentence is seemingly meant to imply that the girl's illness - the nature of which has not been publicized - is Israel's fault!

Now, why wouldn't the BBC have written these facts as background information?

- Israel regularly allows Gazans to be treated at Israeli hospitals.
- In 2009, Israel allowed over 10,000 Gazans to come to Israel for medical purposes.
- Another 10,000 Gazans exited the Strip for other reasons.
- An Israeli medical clinic that was built specifically for Gazans injured in Operation Cast Lead was closed down when Hamas refused to allow any residents to get treated there.
- Hamas has methodically taken over all the medical associations in Gaza since seizing power, replacing doctors if their political views weren't deemed to be pro-Hamas enough.
- Hamas has used Gaza hospitals and ambulances to transport and protect its own militants

It seems that the BBC has a narrative about Gaza and it will only mention the facts that it deems relevant to pushing that narrative. It just so happens that this narrative has nothing bad to say about Hamas and everything bad to say about Israel.

(h/t "Guest")

British media ignores Malam report against Goldstone

From Just Journalism:

Last month (March 2010), Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Malam) released a report that sought to challenge many of the findings in the Goldstone report. In particular, it marshalled evidence that Hamas had repeatedly used civilians to shield its fighters – an allegation the Goldstone report specifically claimed to have found no evidence of. The Israeli organisation, however, produced footage purporting to show children being used to shield a Hamas fighter as he exited a residential building from where he was firing at Israeli forces.

Despite the fact that these findings cast doubt on the veracity of the Goldstone report’s claim not to have found evidence of Hamas using human shields during the 2008/9 Gaza conflict, they have not been reported by any of the UK broadsheets or on the BBC News website since it was published. This is even more notable since all three mainstream English-language Israeli news websites (Haaretz, Jerusalem Post and YNet) featured articles on the Malam report, and its implications for the Goldstone report. YNet, for example, noted that it ‘largely conflicts with the findings of the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead’, while the Jerusalem Post described it as documenting ‘how the Goldstone Commission whitewashed the way Hamas waged its battle against Israel’. The video footage was posted at the top of the Jpost article.

I had missed that footage of children as human shields when the report was released, so here it is:

Great BBC video on Gaza

BBC 2 sent a real soldier, Iraq war veteran Col. Tim Collins, to look at Sderot and Gaza. He saw the evidence of secondary mosque explosions that Goldstone didn't. He interviews Gaza rocket makers and gets chased out of Rafah where the weapons smugglers work. He honestly looks at one of the bigger accidents of the war, where the Gaza doctor's daughters were killed, and shows how difficult it would be for Israelis to have distinguished the civilians.

Wish I could embed it.

(h/t t34zakat)
UPDATE: Here's the article about the video that includes most of the text, from Conflictzones.tv: (h/t Gaia)

Inside the Gaza Strip – subjected to a short but bloody war against Israeli forces that ended in January 2009, and under the control of the Islamist militant movement Hamas - Colonel Tim Collins drove up to a massive roadside poster.

“It shows the Legoland town of Sderot [southern Israel] being bombarded by unguided weapons,” said the Colonel. “[Responding to] this is what the Israelis say the attack was all about. But this poster wasn’t produced by an Israeli PR company. It was paid for by Hamas, and they’ve got their badge on it – showing a war crime by any standard.”

The main target for the rocket fire depicted in the Hamas roadside billboard had indeed been the small Israeli border town of Sderot.

In the town, British-born Tottenham-supporting police officer Micky Rosenfeld showed the Colonel gaily-painted bomb-shelters into which the town’s 30-thousand citizens would flee for relative safety every time they heard a piercing “Red Alert” siren. The Colonel noted that fragments [of metal ball-bearings stuffed into rocket-heads] had ripped holes even into the thick metal walls that surround the bomb-shelters. “That’s vicious,” Colonel Collins said. “If that hits your flesh it would tear you up.”

Thousands of rockets and mortars had fallen during the eight years before Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip at the end of 2008, Colonel Collins was told.

“Growing up in Belfast during The Troubles, I can sympathise with them. It’s no way to live … These were by and large people who had decamped from an Islamic society in north Africa and found themselves living on the front-line,” Colonel Collins said, [referring to Jews from Arab north Africa who had come to Israel in the 1950s and had often settled in small towns in the country’s under-developed south.]

Behind the town’s police station was a collection of the remnants of rockets that had struck the town. Colonel Collins picked up a rusting rocket casing. “It can’t be accurate, because it’s heavy and imprecise – so this is an indiscriminate weapon,” said Colonel Collins. Police Chief Inspector Rosenfeld told him how he believed the rocket-firers sometimes managed to target their missiles -- by listening to Israeli radio which revealed where the first rocket or rockets had hit, and then adjusting their sights to make the next ones more lethal.

Rosenfeld also showed him the remnants of more advanced Grad rockets, which he said had been smuggled to the armed Palestinian groups via a number of countries through tunnels under the Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt. Twenty of these had hit cities far further up the coast or far further inland during three days at the start of the Gaza-Israel war, he said. Israel feared that if it failed to act, Palestinian militants in Gaza would over time be able to smuggle in or develop rocketry that could hit further and further away until missiles reached the main Israeli city of Tel Aviv.

Late at night, the Colonel managed to rendezvous inside the Gaza Strip with men who fired rockets across the border into Israel. The Colonel was being driven by Abu Haroon, a beaded fighter from a sub-group of Fatah called the Abu Rish Brigade. At the rocket men’s makeshift base inside a refugee camp, Abu Haroon and his men produced a rocket and started dismantling it. “TNT [a high explosive] was spilling out of the back of it,” recalls the Colonel, “and I was particularly nervous when they put a badly-constructed home-made fuse on top of the device, making it a live weapon, then brandished a detonator.”

Abu Haroon made it clear that these rockets were “simple” devices that could not be accurately targeted. “We don’t know where these drop,” he told the Colonel. “Because there are no electronics here. Not big shooting rocket like Israel says about it.” Expressing the hope that conflict will end and that “the children can grow up without ever having known the war that Abu Haroon and his men have known, God willing,” Colonel Collins left and was driven back to his hotel in Gaza City.

Later, in Bet Hanun, northern Gaza Strip, the Colonel examined the remains of a deserted and destroyed mosque -- one of several that had been smashed during the Gaza-Israel war. Inside the now deserted mosque, Colonel Collins looked up at a gaping hole left by an air strike. “The allegation was that this was used as a storage facility for weapons,” said the Colonel as he tramped about the ruined structure. “I have to say that what was commonplace in Iraq was also seemed to be evident in Gaza as well. Down in the cellar of the mosque there was clear evidence of secondary explosions. It’s my opinion that the only thing that could have caused this was that explosives were stored here.”

The Colonel also went to the scene of possibly the most well-publicised tragedy of the war. A tank had fired two rounds into an apartment block. The shells struck a bedroom and killed three daughters and a niece of a local doctor, Ezzedeen Abualaish. Colonel Collins found the scene “heart-rending”, but when he painstakingly found the exact spot from which the tank, perched on a hillside overlooking Gaza City, had fired two rounds, he was able to work out what the Israeli tank-gunner would have been able to see.

“The civilians had been evacuated into Gaza…. I have to say that it would be difficult from this range, even through optic sights, to make out clear targets. So you would only see shadows.” However the Colonel said firing a main armaments round without actually identifying the target was “questionable”. [An Israeli military investigation in 2009 stated that the gunner had believed there were Palestinian fighters moving around in what he and his commander thought was an abandoned building. The doctor had been telephoned by an Israeli military officer days before advising him and his family and all inhabitants to leave the building, the report stated.]

On his way out of the Gaza Strip, Colonel Collins passed alongside a plethora of roadside pictures and billboards plastered with the faces of young men killed in years of conflict with Israel, each shown in a heroic pose wielding a weapon. “Some call them ‘legitimate targets’, others call them ‘martyrs’. They’ve certainly been ‘martyred’ to suit someone’s agenda. In my view, like in Ireland, it’s a waste of young lives.”

As Colonel Collins walked towards a heavily fortified checkpoint to exit Gaza, he reflected on his visit. “The real victims here are the people of Gaza, and the people of Sderot, who’ve been used like cattle,” he said. “In my view that’s the real crime.”

BBC doesn't recognize Israel as being part of Mideast

The BBC has a show called the "Middle East Business Report" that airs weekly. ifindterror tweeted me, saying that s/he never noticed anything about Israel on that program.

Sure enough, the word "Israel" does not appear in any of the synopses of shows over the past couple of months. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan all pop up, along with the impacts of Arab trade with China and the UK, but nothing about Israel's economy.

I guess Israel's economy is not very noteworthy compared to the other nations in the area. Or maybe Israel just isn't where we all thought it was.

The BBC tells half the water story

The BBC, reliably, writes another story about how poor Palestinian Arabs have no water and greedy Jews take it all:

Mohammed Abbas is sick, with chronic diarrhoea. Not for the first time.
He and his family live in a Palestinian village with no running water, no sewage system, and no prospect of getting either any time soon.
Watching her son, eyes closed, clutching his stomach on a mattress on the floor, his mother, Sunna, told me she is desperate.
Sunna's story is becoming increasingly common in the West Bank. The name of her village, Faqua, means spring water bubbles in Arabic, but access to water here disappeared long ago.
The village council says most of the underground springs were appropriated by Israel in 1948 when the state was founded.
An Israeli-Palestinian Water Committee was set up in the mid-1990s as part of the Oslo peace accords.
But Palestinians say Israel makes it virtually impossible for them to dig new wells or to join Israel's water grid.

Much later in the article, after the emotional parts are over, the Beeb does its fake even-handed paragraph:

But Israel says it is not to blame here - Palestinian planning is.
Israel claims Faqua village never applied to join the water grid - although the local mayor disputes this.

Israel says the Palestinian Water Authority should be more effective across the West Bank.

And then, after quoting the anonymous "Israel," the BBC goes back to quoting B'Tselem members with real names.

The bias in the article itself is easy to see if you know where to look. The BBC wanted to illustrate a story about Arab-only water shortages and chooses an Arab town that is not hooked up to the grid. Are there any small Israeli villages that rely on water coming from trucks? Who knows? The BBC didn't look for any.

However, the august journalists certainly couldn't be bothered to look for scenes like this one taken at a swimming pool Hebron and and juxtaposing the smiling West Bank swimmers with poor Mohammed.

More importantly, there was another story about water in the area that would seem to be a wee bit relevant.

You see, Israel, Jordan and the PA had been working with the World Bank to plan a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.

The World Bank has approved a pilot plan for a canal linking the Red Sea to the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea, Israeli Development Minister Sylvan Shalom announced on Saturday.
Israeli public radio said the bank will provide 1.25 billion dollars in finance for the project.
The initial proposal is for a 180 kilometre (110 miles) channel to transport 200 cubic metres of water, of which half would gush into the Dead Sea and half would feed a giant desalination plant jointly run by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, Shalom's ministry said.
The next stage would see the construction of a canal to supply two billion m3 of water a year to maintain and increase water levels in the Dead Sea, which is on course to dry out completely by 2050 if nothing is done.

This desalination plant would actually be the largest one in the world. It would go a long way towards addressing the scarcity of water in the region.

And the PA is trying to stop the project by linking it to settlements:

The Palestinian Authority said on Wednesday it would ask the World Bank to stop funding studies for a Dead Sea-Red Sea water project if Israel did not withdraw plans to confiscate West Bank land.

Israel last month disclosed a plan to expropriate large tracts of land between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, some of it areas exposed by the lake's receding water level over the past 30 years. Publication of formal notices in the Palestinian press triggered an angry reaction from the Palestinian Authority, which denounced it as a grab for 35,000 acres of their land -- equivalent to 2 percent of the occupied West Bank.

If it goes ahead, the confiscation will separate the northern West Bank from the south, Palestinians say, ultimately denying them a viable state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as endorsed by major world powers.

"If Israel does not halt this plan, the Palestinian National Authority will ask the World Bank to stop the two-seas project, linking the Red Sea with the Dead Sea," said a cabinet statement issued by Western-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's office.

Is Israel really confiscating so much land for this project? Is it really bisecting the territories? It sounds unlikely.

But notice that the PA has made a decision that its own water resources are less important than politics. The PA could protest any alleged land grabs in many ways, including appealing to a sympathetic US, but it is choosing a way that would jeopardize its own future water supply.

Poor Sunna from Faqua is going to watch her son die because the PA decided that a political statement was more important than clean water for her village.

Not only is the PA trying to penalize Israel's water supply, and its own water supply, but Jordan's as well!

Would the BBC ever spin a story in that way?

The BBC looks at Jeremy Bowen

The BBC just released a lengthy report that addresses complaints about the accuracy and impartiality of Jeremy Bowen, its Middle East editor.

While the report did find that Bowen did breach its impartiality standards in one case and its accuracy standards in a very small number of cases brought by a complainant, for the majority of the complaints the BBC found that he reported fairly and accurately. (Briefly, the BBC found that Bowen's description of the Six Day War as "“The myth of the 1967 Middle East war was that the Israeli David slew the Arab Goliath. It is more accurate to say that there were two Goliaths in the Middle East in 1967" was not an impartial statement.)

One of the complaints, and the BBC's response, caught my eye.

Bowen, in a different report about the Israeli presence on Har Homa, referred to “the considerable number of Israelis who say that their country’s colonisation of the West Bank has been a national disaster.” The complaint mentioned that a majority of Israelis support settlements in some way and that the phrase "considerable number" was misleading and false.

The BBC's findings show its own bias:

The Committee considered that a “considerable number of Israelis”, did not suggest a majority or imply a figure close to 50%. The Committee then considered the evidence provided to it regarding this comment. The Committee noted that poll findings would suggest that more than 10% of Israelis disagree with the settlements, and the figure could be much higher depending on the precise questions asked. The Committee accepted that it was reasonable to summarise their objections in this way.

The Committee discussed how far it was meaningful to link the extension of Har Homa to Israelis’ opinions of colonisation in the West Bank, given that the Israeli public may distinguish between Har Homa and the West Bank. The Committee concluded that this fact does not alter the meaning of the sentence, namely that announcement that Har Homa would be extended led to consternation among those Israelis who consider the colonisation of the West Bank to have been a national disaster. The Committee considered that this sentence is logical and that there is no evidence that it is inaccurate.

The Committee did not feel that Jeremy Bowen was obliged to mention that the majority of Israelis were in favour of settlements, and concurred with the ECU in this regard.

In conclusion, this element of the complaint was not upheld as a breach of the guidelines on either accuracy or impartiality.

In other words, if 10% of a group believes something, that is considered a "considerable number." Of course, anyone who looks at polls can spin any poll using that criteria to demonize any group of people, because rarely does any poll show that over 90% of people agree with something.

To give a more concrete example, a poll of Muslims worldwide found that 6.5% thought that 9/11 was "completely" justified and another 7% found it "mostly" justified. (This is not counting the 23% who found them justified "in some way.") Would the BBC countenance a report saying that "a considerable number of Muslims justify the 9/11 attacks"?

And in terms of pure numbers, the 13.5% that find 9/11 fully or mostly justified represent over 150 million Muslims, which - by any definition - is a "considerable number," an order of magnitude more than there are Jews worldwide. Yet I cannot imagine that the BBC would ever use such terminology to describe Muslims, which would be far more accurate than the report referenced above.

The reason is obvious: the terminology "a considerable number" implies a number that is large enough to have political clout, at least 30%, and certainly not the 10% that the BBC has decided it implies.

So when the BBC cannot accurately note an obvious breach of impartiality, the entire process is a joke.

(Other posts about Bowen and his obvious bias here and here.)
(h/t Oyavagoy)

UPDATE: See Melanie Phillips.

British media watchdog group issues report on Gaza

Just Journalism, a UK-based media monitoring group that focuses on British coverage of Israel, just released an impressively comprehensive report detailing what the British media did wrong, and right. Here are the conclusions:

Impartiality

Our primary conclusion relates to impartiality. When it came to the UK’s public service broadcaster, the BBC, there were clear instances when there was a crucial lack of separation between opinion and fact. With its considerable degree of world influence, this is an area the BBC certainly needs to revisit.

With the BBC’s appointment of a Middle East ‘Editor’ a few years ago, it was perhaps inevitable that audiences would experience some form of ‘editorialisation’, or, at the very least, an element of interpretation of the facts to provide a deeper level of analysis.

However, several years on, it is clear that the boundaries between editorial opinion and factual news reporting in the BBC’s output in this area remain extremely blurred. This is particularly the case with the BBC News website, where the Middle East Editor is effectively allowed free reign to air his own opinions about the conflict, with few signs to alert audiences that this is in fact his own opinion, rather than that of the BBC.

Whether through an excessive focus on humanizing the conflict from the Palestinian perspective or through straightforward expressions of a personal opinion, we must conclude that the BBC was certainly not impartial in presenting an opinion of the conflict and that one of its key guidelines on impartiality was breached on several occasions: “Our journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy. Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters.” (BBC Editorial Guidelines)

On a more positive note, much of the news reporting from the BBC’s various correspondents was balanced and thoughtful and in stark contrast to the BBC’s coverage of the Israel / Hizbollah war in 2006.

In their own editorials too, the press demonstrated an encouraging even balance of perspectives, with The Observer publishing the highest proportion of neutral pieces. Regarding opinion pieces, our research bears out the fact that the UK media is a free and diverse institution, wherein commentators, columnists and cartoonists are at liberty to express a multiplicity of perspectives. The fact that the opinion pieces in the press were twice as likely to be critical of Israel’s offensive as supportive may reveal a great deal about prevailing attitudes towards Israel in the UK, but it certainly does not constitute a breach of impartiality.

Factual accuracy

Our second conclusion relates to the area of factual accuracy. It is clear that several key facts relating to the conflict were, at best, omitted and, at worst, misrepresented on an extremely large scale. The startling under-representation of the nature of Hamas and the lack of context of the history of violence against Israel, both editorially and visually, raises serious questions about whether the media was being factually accurate in its reporting. Does this constitute a breach of the journalistic guidelines on factual accuracy? Technically not. But it certainly seems to contravene the Press Complaint Commission’s guidelines that “The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.” (PCC Code of Practice: Section 1(iii)). Furthermore, it raises doubts over whether the BBC’s Editorial Guideline stating, “We will weigh all relevant facts and information to get at the truth” was upheld to the standard the media consumer would expect.

Balance
Was the media’s coverage of the conflict balanced? In certain areas it was: in the amount of time and space allocated to quoting Israeli spokespeople (if anything, the exposure they were given was disproportionate to that given to Hamas officials, although this may largely be due to a number of factors including the media ban in Gaza); in the overall stance taken by the UK’s broadsheets in their editorial pieces and in the BBC’s coverage of both perspectives of the conflict, specifically in its news reports.

However, when it came to arguably some of the more influential and emotive areas of reporting, we detected serious shortcomings in overall balance and a tendency to depict Israel firmly in an aggressive light. Why, for instance, did Hamas only feature in one quarter of all press cartoons and more than 75% depict Israel as the primary aggressor in the conflict? Why was there an almost obsessive focus on Israel’s ‘control’ of the media environment with no similar questioning about Hamas’s role in influencing sources and statistics in Gaza until after the ceasefire? Why did the Guardian and The Independent choose to publish over five times as many opinion pieces critical of Israel than supportive? And why did the media, especially the BBC, not sufficiently differentiate between civilian and Hamas casualties?

These questions raise issues over the thought processes and perspectives of the media in reporting the conflict and whether it can truly be said that the journalistic principles of ‘balance’ were upheld.

The BBC's Gaza appeal debacle

The BBC last week made a strange decision not to broadcast an appeal to help Gazans. In their words, "We decided not to broadcast the DEC's public appeal because we wished to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in the context of covering a continuing news story where issues of responsibility for civilian suffering and distress are intrinsic to the story and remain highly contentious."

Anyone who ever watches how the BBC covers Israel cannot but laugh at this absurd logic. Israelis and Zionists have no problem with the millions of dollars being spent to help Gazans; only with the millions being given to Hamas, directly or indirectly. Israel itself spends incredible amounts of time, effort and money to help Gazans. Israel has never protested aid going to Gazans from WHO, the Red Cross or any other charity group.

In a weird way, the BBC in making this decision seems to have betrayed its own genteel anti-semitism. While no Jewish or Zionist group asked the BBC not to air the appeal, the Beeb assumed that the selfish, powerful Jews would be upset at giving money to Gazans. Rather than deal with those imaginary protests the BBC thought that they should throw the Elders a bone, deny the appeal and use it as "proof" of their objectivity.

One reason that the BBC is so skittish is because of the Balen report that showed the BBC to have anti-Israel bias. While the BBC has spent enormous amounts of time and money to keep the report secret, it appears to have made an impact on the BBC - but in the wrong way. Rather than actually improve its reporting, the Beeb instead decided to make cosmetic decisions like quashing the appeal for Gazan aid.

The BBC's vaunted "impartiality," of course, mistakes evenhandedness for reality. The BBC made the assumption that Zionists would be as upset at aid being given to Arabs as Arabs would if the BBC appealed for bomb shelters for Sderot. That may be evenhanded but it is hardly impartial. It betrays the BBC's biases.

And now, instead of dealing with imaginary threats from the all-powerful Jewish lobby, they have to deal with very real threats from very real people.

From News of the World:

NEWSNIGHT hardman Jeremy Paxman was chased onto a tube train by a raging Palestinian supporter.
Shocked commuters watched as the presenter leapt into a carriage, pursued by a protester who was outraged at the BBC’s refusal to broadcast a Gaza appeal.
‘Rotweiller’ Paxman ended up on the receiving end of a verbal rant at London’s Green Park station.
After fleeing down the escalators, Paxo, 58, managed to squeeze in between the closing doors of a train.
He told a friend: “A man started shouting at me, ‘Paxman, you are a Zionist agent’.
“He pursued me down the escalators, moving very quickly to get me. I turned round and told him I’d tell him my opinions on Gaza if he settled down but he carried on shouting.

And this is not an isolated incident. There have been protests outside BBC buildings over the past week.

So now the BBC will have to bend over backwards to prove to anti-semitic, anti-Zionist idiots that they are not the Zionist tools they appear to be to protestors. One example is a former BBC journalist and now government minister:

Others, including Health Minister Ben Bradshaw, pointed the finger at Israel. Insinuating the BBC had bowed to pressure from the Jewish state, he said: "I am afraid the BBC has to stand up to pressure from the Jewish state occasionally."

It would be nice, of course, if the BBC would actually start to be as fair and impartial as it pretends to be.

BBC anti-Zionism on display

From the BBC website, by their diplomatic and defense editor, Mark Urban:

The global honeymoon that accompanied Barack Obama's election was never going to last forever, but there are some people for whom it already appears to be over - even though the president elect will not take power until 21st January. The Illinois senator's desire to name his administration, in order to 'hit the ground running' has already been the cause of some political sniping, and so have his meagre foreign policy pronouncements to date.

The appointment of Rahm Emanuel in October as White House Chief of Staff nettled many. There were his former Republican opponents in the House of Representatives, who consider him abrasively partisan, but I am not talking about them. Put his name and 'Zionist' into Google and you will see what I mean. The brickbats are already flying on certain Islamic, 'progressive', and far right websites.

With the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the plot thickens for those who wish to imply that a good man - President-elect Obama - is surrounding himself with 'zionists' who will prevent any fresh thinking about Middle East peace. Ms Clinton is not of course Jewish, unlike Mr Emanuel, but she has been a two-term senator for New York state.

"She's had a certain position which has not been very friendly toward the Palestinians", said Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner General of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency on the Today programme this morning, adding, "we hope that there'll be a broader view once she comes into office". Ms AbuZayd's job involves daily dealing with the dismal humanitarian consequences of Israel's blockade of Gaza, so I'm not surprised she longs for a different US foreign policy in the region. But the implication from an international civil servant - who must get on with all the relevant players - that an incoming US Secretary of State is bringing too much political baggage to the job is unusual, to put it mildly.

Up until this point, Urban appears to dissociate himself from those "progressive" websites he mentions. But from here on in, he makes it clear that he agrees with their anti-Zionist philosophy:

Is it not obvious that Secretary Clinton, representing the US national interest, will serve quite different political imperatives to Senator Clinton, representing one of the largest Jewish democratic constituencies in the world?

In other words, "chill out, progressives, Obama and his team may very well still turn out to be as anti-Israel as you and I want him to be."

The response to the appointment of the new foreign policy team shows something else. In the first place, the president-elect's campaign promise of change was always going to look less exciting once he put in place the people with the necessary political experience to run their departments. If you think Ms Clinton comes with political baggage - what about Robert Gates, who will switch from being President Bush's defence secretary for the past to [sic] years to the new president's administration?

Secondly, there are certain laws of political gravity that cannot be defied, whatever the brand of a new administration. The anti-American imperative is so central to certain ideologies - in this case militant Islam - that any Jewish appointees or appeals to Jewish voters will be used to argue the administration is pro-Zionist. It might turn out to be, but shouldn't everyone wait until the new president has been sworn in and set out some Middle East policies before jumping to that conclusion?

Urban pointedly does not say that the anti-Zionism of the "certain Islamic, 'progressive', and far right websites" is wrong. No, their crime is not being against the existence of the state of Israel - that is a valid and laudatory goal. Their only mistake is that they are jumping to conclusions that Obama is not sufficiently anti-Israel enough.

Just wait, our BBC editor is saying: All of us anti-Zionists may still be pleasantly surprised by Obama's "fresh thinking" on how to dismantle Israel.

Israeli actor playing Saddam in BBC drama

From Reuters:

The Israeli actor playing Saddam Hussein in a new television series once narrowly escaped a missile fired by the late dictator's army.
But for Igal Naor, taking the lead role in "House of Saddam", the BBC/HBO dramatisation of Saddam's 24-year rule airing in Britain from Wednesday, it was not about revenge.

Instead, the 50-year-old from near Tel Aviv believes his experience of the conflicts and complexities of the Middle East, and his childhood effectively raised as an Arab in Israel after his family left Baghdad, gave him the edge over other actors.

"In the street everyone spoke Iraqi. It was a 'little Baghdad' around Tel Aviv," he said of the neighbourhood where he grew up that was dominated by Iraqi Jews who left Baghdad after Israel's founding 60 years ago.

"I could understand much better than, say, a British actor or an American actor about what this man is and the environment he was living in," Naor told Reuters by telephone.

"This is my area, the Middle East, Iraq. I can understand things like the special need for honour, pride. I live in an environment of war and blood."

He recalled how a missile fired by Iraq at Israel in 1991, during the first Gulf War triggered by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, landed close by.

"As an Israeli, he was an enemy," Naor explained. "In 1991 a missile he sent to Tel Aviv fell 50 metres from my house with one tonne of explosives. Luckily nothing happened to us."

Nevertheless, he added: "I didn't love him or hate him."

Naor, who has appeared in Hollywood movies "Munich" and "Rendition", rejected the idea that casting an Israeli as Saddam should be seen as controversial.

"We are actors, we are artists. Why should we be Israelis, Lebanese or Egyptian?"

Although he encountered no negative feedback at home, there was a backlash against him, and more particularly his co-star Amr Waked, in Waked's native Egypt, he added.

Reuters of course doesn't expand on this last point. From Variety last year:

Egypt's Actors Union, which opposes normalization of ties with Israel, is furious and says Waked now faces being banned from ever filming in Egypt again.
"The position of the union is clear in its rejection of normalization and requires that members abide by this position," declared Ashraf Zaki, chairman of the union.
"He will be facing an investigation as soon as he returns," Zaki added. Waked is in Tunisia for the shooting of the drama, "Between Two Rivers," which is backed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and HBO.
The actor has defended his position, telling Egyptian papers he did not know an Israeli was involved. Furthermore, he told the Egyptian Mail, the film is pro-Arab and criticizes US foreign policy.
He has made it clear he has no intention of leaving the series, in which he plays Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who fled from Iraq to Jordan but eventually returned and was executed.
Were he to quit now, the actor said, he would be in breach of his contract.

Notice how bold Waked is in the face of criticism: first he says he didn't know, then he says the film is critical of the US and finally he falls back on not wanting to breach his contract.

Outside of that, he fully supports the Egyptian actors' boycott of Israel.

CAMERA: BBC caught fabricating a story

CAMERA points out that the BBC showed footage of a home being bulldozed and claimed it was the home of the mass murderer of Mercaz HaRav's family.

The only problem is that the house still stands. The BBC showed footage of a house demolition and lied about what it was showing.

This goes way beyond media bias. Read (and watch) the whole thing.

BBC's "Monopoly" on anti-semitism

Many other JBloggers have been dealing with the issue of Jerusalem on the Monopoly board during this past week. As CNN summarizes:

Monopoly, the world's best-selling board game, is going global. A simple idea, substituting the iconic properties of the original game with hallmark cities of the world.

Hasbro is letting people vote on its Web site for which cities to include in the new game.

In this celebration of capitalism, would-be moguls could buy up properties in cities such as Moscow, Russia; Tokyo, Japan and Jerusalem, Israel.

Wait. Nix that last one -- at least the Israel part.

Given the white-hot controversy over Israel -- the world's most fought-over piece of real estate -- should the board game refer to "Jerusalem, Israel" even though Palestinians say Jerusalem will be the capital of any future Palestinian state? Should it say "Jerusalem, Palestine?"

Instead of rolling the dice, parent company Hasbro is taking the middle ground.

The company is letting people vote on its Web site for which cities to include in the new game -- "Dublin, Ireland" for example. It recently removed "Israel" after "Jerusalem" and then eventually removed all of the country names.

Hasbro told The Associated Press that a mid-level employee decided on her own to take out "Israel" after pro-Palestinian groups and bloggers complained -- sparking even more protests from the other side.

"It was never our intention to print any countries on the final boards and any online tags were merely used as a geographic reference to help with city selection," Hasbro said in a written statement. "We would never want to enter into any political debate. We apologize for any upset this has caused our Monopoly fans."

The BBC, when talking about the issue a few days ago in a "diary" by Tim Franks, decided for some bizarre reason to use it as a springboard to accuse Israeli Jews of racism:

Yehiel Leiter is the director general of One Jerusalem, a group that, in its mission statement, declares a single objective: "Maintaining a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel."

The Monopoly campaign, says Leiter, "puts Jerusalem on the table. It has people not avoid Jerusalem because it's contested".

The group also says it has handed out 128,000 golden ribbons on the streets of Jerusalem (the colour is because of the song, "Jerusalem of Gold").

Mudi had a golden ribbon fluttering from the wing mirror of his taxi, until recently.

But Mudi is unusual, in that he is an Israeli Arab.

"The truth is," he told me, as I sat alongside him in his taxi, "Jewish people, especially religious people, won't stop any taxi driven by an Arab."

But when they see a golden ribbon, says Mudi, "they know no Arab guy would have it on his car".

Mudi has another advantage: he says he does not "look" like an Arab, and he speaks Hebrew fluently. Passengers mistake him for a Jew.

"And very, very few people are not prejudiced," in what they say to him. At least, that is the case in Jerusalem.

"In Tel Aviv," he says, "it is exactly the opposite. They don't care I'm an Arab".

When his Jerusalem passengers disembark, Mudi says he tells them that his name is, in fact, Mahmoud.

He says, though, that he has not felt "comfortable" with the ribbon. Indeed, the other day, when he was washing his taxi, he ripped it off, and so far has not replaced it.

Still, many of his Arab colleagues continue to tie a ribbon around their rear-view or wing mirrors, in order not to put off potential customers.

Some, says Mudi, even wear a yarmulke (Jewish skullcap).

Our intrepid BBC reporter, of course, bases his accusation that Jews refuse to go into Arab taxicabs based on a sample size of one, and many Israelis wrote to comment that the reporter was a bit off:

I am an Israeli Arab and I also tend to be a bit concerned when near the Palestinian controlled areas when geting into a taxi, as for the rest of Israel there are no such problems. Please don't try and make some racialist stories out of Israeli Jews, they are my fellow citizens!
Dr Moukie Fallah, Herzalia Israel

Firstly, the taxi story is obviously made up. Most taxi drivers here are Arabs, so waiting to find a Jewish one would take for ever. Also there is no way of telling if the taxi is driven by an Arab or a Jew and quite frankly we dont care! Secondly, even as a voter of Israel's most Left wing party, there is still no denying that J'lem is Israel's capital...so why not have it listed like that. Most Arabs in Jerusalem want to stay part of Israel and most are rushing to get citizenship.
Yoni, Jerusalem, Israel

I spent two years in Jerusalem and never heard of anyone avoiding an Arab taxi!
Avi, Manchester, UK

About the Mudi story: who cares who drives? In my work place most of the drivers are Israeli Arabs - and nobody cares. The story don't reflect nothing about the general situation here.
Shimon, student, Ben Gurion University, Israel

I am a non-Jewish American who lived in Jerusalem for over a year recently, and I still travel there several times a week to go to school. None of my Jewish Israeli friends has ever expressed any reservations about taking cabs driven by Arabs. We're students, and life in Jerusalem is not cheap, so we usually take the first guy who gives us a fair price. As others have pointed out, you can't necessarily tell at first whether he's Arab or Jewish or Klingon anyway.
Taybeh Chaser

The reason many Jerusalemites avoid Arab taxis is not, as you insuate by your lack of explanation, because they are racists. Most people do it out of fear of being driven into Arab East Jerusalem or Ramallah, for criminal or terrorist / political purposes. Jews in Tel Aviv are not fussed by the affiliation of their taxi drivers because there are no dangerous areas near Tel Aviv.
Shaya, Manchester, UK

I am Jewish & religious. I lived in Jerusalem for 28 years. Although I don't live there any more my parents do. I have used taxis all my life so I find Mudy's story awkward and strange. Never in my life, I checked up if the taxi driver is an Arab or not. Most recently I was sitting in a cab and the taxi driver's name was Muhamed, we discussed all the way to my parents' house and eventually finished our conversation blessing each other. So BBC, please stop this nonsense!
Joseph Elboim, Beit Shemesh, Israel

Something is not quite right in the Mudi story. All Israeli taxis have a prominent notice showing the driver's name, licence number and photograph. Consequently it would be very difficult for him to disguise his origins.
Victor Leaf, London, UK

Clearly, the BBC reporter decided to use the Monopoly story as a means to get in some old fashioned anti-semitism into a "respectable" article. It would never occur to him that "Mudi" is the one who shows the most bigotry - because the BBC doesn't want to, God forbid, accuse Arabs of racism.

Only Jews.

More BBC crimes of omission and commission

It is not only the BBC that has these problems, of course, but the BBC claims to be "independent, impartial and honest", and this clearly isn't true:

More than 1,000 Palestinian pilgrims stranded in Egypt have held protests after they were blocked from travelling through a border crossing to Gaza.

The pilgrims broke windows and started fires to protest against the decision to move them to a temporary camp.

Israel has insisted that the pilgrims must return to the Gaza Strip through a crossing that it controls.

It says it wants to ensure that no weapons or money are being channelled to militant groups.

The pilgrims returning from the Hajj in Mecca include several prominent members of the Hamas movement, who fear they will be detained if they try to travel through an Israeli-controlled crossing.

The BBC finally admits that some of the "pilgrims" are Hamas members. They don't mention, however, that there at least some known terrorists among them.

Egyptian authorities have moved more than 1,100 of the pilgrims to several temporary camps set up in and around the Mediterranean coastal city of el-Arish.

Reports say the pilgrims shouted slogans against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Hundreds of riot police surrounded the protesters, while the fires were put out.

A 67-year-old Palestinian woman collapsed and died during the protests, reports said.

After the unrest ended, some pilgrims continued their protest by refusing to accept meals provided by the Egyptian government.

Again, accurate as far as it goes. But the Beeb doesn't mention the very pertinent fact that some of the pilgrims that left through Rafah have already returned via Keren Shalom:

Palestinians, returning from the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, cross through the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and Egypt, on their way to Gaza Strip Monday, Dec. 31, 2007. Another group of Palestinian pilgrims, include some members of the militant Hamas group, have rejected Egypt's demands that they enter Gaza through the Israeli-controlled Aouja border crossing. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

If some of the pilgrims who went through Egypt are returning to their homes through Keren Shalom, then that makes the motives of the others a bit suspect. (The other set of pilgrims who went through the West Bank and Jordan returned through the Erez crossing.) One would think that this little fact should be mentioned.

The BBC might also want to verify or refute Debka's report that Hamas hajj pilgrims met with Ahmadinejad in Mecca and he gave them $50 million, and that they got an additional $100 million from the Muslim Brotherhood. Is Debka any more or less reliable than the anonymous "reports" the BBC mentions above? There is no way to know - the Beeb doesn't reveal who is behind those reports.

In early December, Israel allowed some 2,200 Palestinian pilgrims to leave Gaza through the Rafah border-post.

This is simply a lie - Israel protested Egypt's opening of Rafah, and the BBC did report that.

BBC bias comes through again

Here's a classic example of how the BBC pretends to be objective but proves its bias, mostly by what it doesn't bother to mention:

Israel has protested to Egypt over the opening of a border crossing to allow Muslim pilgrims from Gaza to make their way through Egypt to Saudi Arabia.

The Israelis say they are concerned that militants may leave Gaza and go for training in Iran. ...

It is the first time Palestinians in Gaza have been allowed to cross directly into Egypt since June.

Now let's look at what the BBC didn't say:

* Israel is not only "concerned" that terrorists are crossing the border; they identified up to two dozen of them.

* While Egypt might not have allowed Gazans to leave before today, they did allow some 85 terrorists to re-enter Gaza in late September and 30 more in October. This is pretty relevant to the story rather than just saying that Israel is "concerned."

* By Egypt allowing Rafah to be opened, they are breaking existing agreements with Israel.

* Israel and the PA had created a mechanism for pilgrims to go to Hajj through Israel; the BBC implies that the Hajj pilgrims had no choice but to go through Rafah for their religious duties.

* Egypt's opening of Rafah legitimizes Hamas as the leader of Gaza Palestinians; they ignored the wishes of Abbas and the PA, let alone Israel.

* Rafah is only supposed to be opened by the PA in the presence of EU observers who have all but abdicated their responsibilities - and the EU Rafah observers include some from Britain.

All of these facts would have made the BBC piece more objective and accurate. By strange coincidence, they would also have made Israel's "concerns" look much more valid and Egypt's role much more insidious.

The bias of BBC's history of PalArab refugees

I just noticed a BBC page that is intended as a backgrounder on the Palestinian Arab refugee situation, and as you would expect, it is filled with anti-Israel spin:

Today there are millions of Palestinians living in exile from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations.

The implication is that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs lived in the area for generations, and this is simply false. A great percentage, perhaps as high as half, moved into Palestine after the Zionists started building a thriving economy in the late 19th century.

Many still suffer the legacy of their dispossession: destitution, penury, insecurity.

Because they are stuck in "refugee" camps by their Arab "brethren."

Palestinian historians, and some Israelis, call 1948 a clear example of ethnic cleansing - perpetrated by the Haganah (later the Israeli Defence Forces) and armed Jewish gangs.

Official Israeli history, by contrast, says most Palestinian refugees left to avoid a war instigated by neighbouring Arab states, though it admits a "handful" of expulsions and unauthorised killings.

The BBC does not admit that any impartial historians support the "official Israeli history" which implies that it is lying propaganda, while the far-left Israeli historians and Palestinian Arab historians are not spun that way at all. It is clear who the BBC believes.

What is undisputed is that the refugees' fate is excluded from most Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts because, given a right of return, their numbers endanger the future of the world's only Jewish state.

The issue of the refugees is therefore seen by many Israelis as an existential one.

Four million UN-registered Palestinian refugees trace origins to the 1948 exodus; 750,000 people belong to families displaced in 1967 - many for the second time.

Palestinian advocacy group Badil says another million and a half hail from pre-1948 Palestine but were not UN-registered, while an additional 274,000 were internally displaced inside Israel after 1948, and 150,000 were displaced in the occupied territories after 1967.

That makes more than six million people, one of the biggest displaced populations in the world.

Note how the BBC accepts Badil's numbers without question. Also there is a sleight-of-hand here where the BBC, like Badil, is not differentiating between "refugees" and "displaced persons," lumping the PalArabs who moved within Israel after 1948 or the Jordanian citizens who moved to Jordan in 1967 - who are citizens of their countries - together with the dwindling refugee numbers and their ever-increasing descendants. The only purpose in doing this is the exaggerate the problem, not to illuminate it.

Israel steadfastly argues that all refugees - and it disputes the numbers - should relinquish any aspirations to return to what is now its territory, and instead be absorbed by Arab host countries or by a future Palestinian state.

The BBC doesn't bother to report Israel's count, because they accept the Palestinian Arab narrative and reject Israel's.

It disavows moral responsibility by arguing that 800,000 Mizrahi Jews were displaced from Arab countries between 1945 and 1956 (most of whom settled in Israel) and insists Palestinians left willingly.

But that view is at odds with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Resolution 194 asserts the refugees' unconditional right of return to live at peace in their old homes or to receive compensation for their losses.

The exact text is "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date..." Since they have not shown the desire to live in peace with Jews, this shows that the BBC's interpretation is incorrect.
As far as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country," it is unclear whether this applies - their country, presumably the British mandate of Palestine, no longer exists. Their returning to their homes, in fact, would compromise the Jews' and Israelis' rights to self-determination, which is enshrined in Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The BBC ignores that issue, only concerning itself with the rights of the Palestinian Arabs.

Even if the UDHR applied, it would only apply to the original 1948 refugees, not to the generations that follow.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of their cause, the practicality of return and questions of moral justice, in Mid-East diplomacy the refugees' fate has been largely ignored.

This has been achieved by a dual process pegging all solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict to the 1967 war, and discounting the events of 1948 as an element of the conflict.

Here the BBC seems to be advocating Israel's destruction, by saying that the descendants of Palestinian Arabs do have the right to move back to pre-1948 towns that no longer exist while Israel does not have the right to determine who can become a citizen.

Israel has effectively deployed a number of arguments to justify this, such as saying that it is the only Jewish state, the refuge of Jews from around the world, while there are 22 Arab countries where the refugees could go.

It also points out that UN General Assembly resolutions have no force under international law and says the unassimilated refugee population has been held hostage by frontline Arab states waiting for Israel's destruction.

The diplomatic focus on 1967 has been advantageous for Israel: territory occupied at that time is regarded as the entire problem, and solutions can therefore be limited to dividing up that land.

This is problematic for Palestinians, however, because it sidelines the Nakba, the "catastrophe" of 1948 - an issue that for them lies at the heart of the conflict.

Notice how the BBC consistently parrots the Palestinian Arab viewpoints as being factual and without attribution, while the Israeli viewpoints are always attributed to Israel and thus implying that they are biased.

Also notice how the BBC doesn't put quotes around the word "Nakba", because it agrees with its characterization as being a catastrophe.

Palestinians accuse Israel of a kind of "Nakba-denial", absolving itself of liability, but thereby condemning itself to perpetual conflict with its Arab neighbours.

Israel vigorously denies such a characterisation. Zionist historians justify what happened in 1948 by saying the new Jewish state was threatened with annihilation by the invading Arab armies.

But some of Israel's "new", or revisionist, historians argue that its founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, exaggerated the Arab threat, in order to implement a covert plan to expel Palestinian civilians and grab as much of the former Palestine as possible.

Again, it is clear who the BBC believes, and again it doesn't consider the idea that non-Zionist historians may believe the Zionist narrative. It is consistently pushing the revisionist historian viewpoint as the truth - and it simply isn't.

Demography - the need to have a large majority of Jews to sustain a Jewish state - has certainly been a key concern for Israel since its foundation.

Under a 1947 UN-sanctioned plan to partition Palestine, Israel would have been established on 55% of the former territory, and without a significant transfer of population the Jews in that territory would have scarcely exceeded the Arab population there.

The 1948 war ended with Israel in control of 78% of the former Palestine, with a Jewish-Arab ratio of 6:1.

The equation brought security for Jewish Israelis, but emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns of 700,000 inhabitants - the kernel of the Palestinian refugee problem today.

With the justification of not wanting to jeopardise its Jewish majority, Israel has kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants out of negotiations on a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

But for most Palestinians, their fate remains an open wound, unless there is a Middle East peace deal that acknowledges what happened to the refugees.

To its credit, the BBC does not seem to refer to current PalArabs as "refugees" but it still assumes that somehow, uniquely in the world, descendants of a single refugee population has the right to move back to the country of its ancestors no matter how long after they leave. The concept that they should be absorbed by their host countries, as refugees have been for millennia, is not on the BBC radar because they wholly swallow the lie that Palestinian Arabs deserve to move to a country that the vast majority have never lived in.

They similarly absolve the Arab nations from their role in keeping the PalArabs in their miserable state and using them as pawns in their own fight against Israel. That story is simply ignored, as is the discrimination that Palestinian Arabs suffer in most Arab countries.

This is not an unbiased history - this is a clear advocation of the Arab viewpoint and it is wrong more often than it is right.