Mon. 14 Mar. 2011 @ 12.18 - All broadsheets and BBC News website reported Friday night's terrorist attack in West Bank in which couple and three children were knifed to death. But Israeli response, rather than attack itself, judged by The Guardian as factor likely to damage prospects for peace. The Guardian's Harriet Sherwood wrote the most prolifically of all UK Middle East correspondents in response to Friday night's gruesome murder of five family members in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. Her depiction of events in four articles published over the weekend, contains vivid language about 'the bloodsoaked scene' in which, '[a]ll five had their throats slit.' Reporting from Itamar on Sunday for The Observer, the journalist cites Israel's Ynet, which reported that a surviving two-year-old: 'was lying next to his bleeding parents, shaking them with his hands and trying to get them to wake up, while crying ... The sight in the house was shocking.' Mon. 14 Mar. 2011 @ 13.24 - BBC News website article claims that Itamar attack 'shocked many Palestinians', while ignoring long history of celebrating killings and lauding perpetrators. Published last night, the BBC News website article, 'Israel approves new Jewish settler homes in West Bank,' covers both the violent murders in Itamar on Friday, and the subsequent announcement by the Israeli government that it was approving new apartments in the West Bank. Discussing how Israelis and Palestinians have reacted to the attack, in which five family members - including children and a baby- were stabbed to death, the article claims: 'The attack on the Fogel family has been met with outrage in Israel and has shocked many Palestinians.' No evidence is supplied for the assertion that the murders have been met with shock by Palestinians, and nothing is mentioned about the fact that some Palestinians actively celebrated them. Mon. 14 Mar. 2011 @ 16.34 - Guardian leader writer's article on poll conducted by MEMO describes organisation as thinktank 'with Palestinian sympathies', whereas in reality they openly promote Hamas. In an article appearing in today's Guardian, leader writer Tom Clark outlines the poll findings published in a new Middle East Monitor (MEMO) report on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 'Jerusalem should be a neutral city say European voters', Clark relays the main statistics arising from the report, which surveyed perceptions of Israel and Palestine, and covered over 7000 respondents across six European countries, including the UK. Of MEMO, Clark simply says that the organisation is 'a thinktank with Palestinian sympathies', before moving on to list some of the findings of the poll. No further information is provided about the organisation, or its outlook. In fact, it recently hosted an article describing Israelis as 'these pathological liars from Eastern Europe' and claiming that 'no people on earth can remain safe if living with or next to Zionism.' In The Weekly Standard, Just Journalism Executive Director Michael Weiss writes about the distinctions in coverage of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood across BBC platforms. March 11, 2011 After Hosni Mubarak's fall in Egypt, there was a whorl of ambiguous media commentary that either tried to present the Muslim Brotherhood as a conciliatory Islamist movement posing no threat to Egypt, its neighbours (read: Israel) or the West, or tried to challenge the Brotherhood about its core tenets and ultimate goals. Nowhere has this confused and contradictory approach been better exhibited than at the British Broadcasting Corporation. An opening salvo in the image war was fired early on in the Egyptian revolution. On January 31, BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen wrote in an online news article: "Unlike the jihadis, [the Brotherhood] does not believe it is at war with the West. It is conservative, moderate and non-violent. But it is highly critical of Western policy in the Middle East." Bowen only affirmed what by then had become his news division's flattering line. On January 28, the BBC posted to its website an info-box summary of the Brotherhood's orientation, which it unquestioningly described as "reject[ing] the use of violence and support[ing] democratic principles."
March 14, 2011 The Wire Guardian cites Israeli response to Itamar attack as damaging prospects for peace
BBC Focus BBC elides Palestinian culture of incitement
The Wire Guardian misrepresents MEMO in coverage of Israel-Palestine poll
Op-eds and Features 
The BBC and the Muslim BrotherhoodDonate
Monday, 14 March 2011
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