Does the BBC view Israel's existence as a legitimate 'grievance'?
Published in: Spectator
Yesterday, there was an organised attempt by Arab mobs to storm three of Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, along with violent rioting and other incidents in east Jerusalem. The trigger for this attempted invasion, which appears to have been organised by Syria and Iran, was ‘Nakba day’, the annual statement of the Arab belief that their failure to wipe out the nascent State of Israel in 1948 was a ‘catastrophe’ which must be reversed. This year, ‘Nakba day’ was the pretext for a well-trailed assault upon Israel’s sovereignty.
You would have learned little of this from a report on yesterday’s events by the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, broadcast on BBC Radio Four’sToday programme this morning.There was no mention of ‘Nakba day’. No mention therefore of the actual goal behind this violence, the destruction of Israel. Instead the events were presented absurdly as the latest development in the ‘Arab Spring’.
But the ‘Arab Spring’ is a revolt by Arabs against their oppressive Arab rulers. Thus Bowen implanted in listeners’ minds the clear implication that the Arabs attacking Israeli sovereignty in furtherance of their aim of wiping Israel off the map altogether were instead protesting at the tyranny under which they were suffering. Indeed, casting doubt upon the suggestion that Iran had a hand in these events, Bowen stated
the Palestinians have many grievances of their own.
It follows therefore that the BBC believes that Israel’s very existence is a ‘Palestinian grievance’, and that Israel’s genocidal attackers are instead the victims of Israel.
Bowen referred to the Israelis killing
quite a lot of people: the biggest loss of life in south Lebanon since the 2006 war.
Well, the latest count is twelve fatalities – and Bowen made no mention at all of the IDF claim that some of these people had been shot by Lebanese soldiers.
With the exception of Syria, he also made no mention that these ‘concerted demonstrations’, as the Today presenter put it, were in fact a concerted attempt to storm Israel’s borders; they were presented instead as ‘protests’ onthe borders. A casual and uninformed listener might well have got the impression therefore that Israel had fired upon crowds merely demonstrating for democracy within Lebanon and Gaza, with a bit of funny business on the Golan caused by President Assad playing ‘Arab Spring’-style politics.
Once again -- can anyone explain why the British licence-fee payer is having to subsidise this atrocious misreporting?
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of a mystery in a different part of the forest. My reference below to the Tel Aviv truck driver shouting ‘Death to Jews’ was taken from a report that I read in the Jerusalem Post by Yaakov Lappin. This was also picked up on this blog which reported thus:
'Driver in Tel Aviv truck rampage shouted death to Jews'By YAAKOV LAPPIN05/15/2011 12:05A witness who claims he stopped the driver who hit several cars on Tel Aviv's Bar Lev Street Sunday in what police called a suspected terror attack, said he initially thought the driver had just lost control of his breaks. Arik Levy told Israel radio that when he went to go help the driver, he saw him continue to hit cars and street lights, and heard him saying ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘death to Jews.’
But the updated Jerusalem Post story to which this links now bears no trace of this reference (a similar eye-witness statement that the driver shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ was reported on Ynet) and has instead substituted the reaction to the incident by the Tel Aviv crowd shouting ‘Death to Arabs’.
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A number of people on the Syrian and Lebanese borders have been killed in these violent clashes, although in a still confused situation the IDF say at least some of these were killed by Lebanese forces. In addition, one Israeli was killed and several others injured in Tel Aviv, as an Arab truck driver smashed his vehicle into a bus and several cars. And in East Jerusalem, two policemen were run over and two Arabs injured when the police stopped a number of Arabs to check their papers. The reason for this concerted onslaught was that today was the anniversary of what Arabs call the 'nakba or ‘catastrophe’, their word for the foundation of the State of Israel when five Arab armies tried to snuff out the nascent state and failed. ‘Nakba day’ is thus a restatement of the goal of eradicating Israel from the face of the earth. Its proper name should therefore be Genocide Day. The invasion was organised by Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. None of this should have come as the slightest surprise: a campaign calling for a Third Intifada to be launched on Genocide Day ran on Facebook for weeks before it was eventually taken down. Naturally, those behind the invasion promptly accused Israel of violence. Hezbollah claimed Israel had violated human rights (Jihadi Fanatics for Human Rights? These people have missed a vocation in stand-up comedy). Hamas claimed that today’s events were ‘a turning point in the Israeli-Arab conflict’ that proved the Palestinian people and Arabs were committed to ending Israelioccupation by which it is seen to mean, explicitly in the context of the symbolism of today, the ‘occupation’ to be ended is of the entire State of Israel by the Jews. And Hamas’s newly-minted effective partner in would-be genocide, Mahmoud Abbas, stated that those killed in clashes with the IDF on Sunday were martyrs to the Palestinian cause, doubtless just like those terrorist murderers of Israelis whom Abbas regularly glorifies by naming squares and public places after them. And of course the western media will also sing from the Hamas/Abbas/Hezbollah songbook. Here’s Omni Ceren on the Commentary blog, explaining both the significance of Genocide Day as a restatement of the aim of eradicating Israel, and the instant response by elements of the western media in misrepresenting what happened. See also, for example, this tendentious headline on the BBC News website: Israeli forces open fire at Palestinian protesters. Don’t you just marvel at that word ‘protesters’, which conjures up the image of a kind of re-run of Tiananmen Square where innocent and heroic individuals are mown down by brutal and repressive tyrants. And here’s the Associated Press, which despite the fact that the driver in Tel Aviv shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ and ‘Death to Jews!’ as he smashed into several vehicles including a bus, nevertheless reported this attack as a traffic accident. As for the most serious of all these incidents, the invasion by thousands from Syria, this can be seen as a cynical attempt by Assad to divert attention from his own slaughter to date of upwards of 800 Syrian protesters – a fact which generates far less attention in the west than Israel's attempts to defend itself against attack. Ironically, there is even some evidence that some of these Syrian invaders were in fact not protesting against the State of Israel but rather attempting to flee from Syria into Israel as a refuge from the tyrannical violence being perpetrated against them by Assad. Before the Big Lie of Israeli ‘human rights abuses‘ today picks up more steam as it travels round the world, here’s a useful round-up with some telling video coverage by Honest Reporting. But there is also this sombre warning fromDaniel Pipes: I predicted a few weeks ago that Arab upheavals might inspire Palestinians to shift "away from warfare and terrorism in favor of non-violent political action. That could include massive non-violent demonstrations such as marching on Israeli towns, borders, and checkpoints."... But, being Palestinians, they could not resist resorting to violence, thereby perhaps undercutting the whole effort. According to an account in Yedi'ot Aharonot, the Syrians trampled the border fence, hurled stones at Israeli troops, wounding ten, and left Israel by early evening, shouting out ‘We'll be back’ to the applause of local villagers. Syrian subjects crossing en masse onto the Golan Heights without Israeli permission has never (to the best of my knowledge) happened before. And, of course, in totalitarian Syria, this sort of occurrence requires government approval. While one can ascribe this protest to Damascus's wanting to divert attention from its own internal problems, it also fits into a larger picture. Danny Danon, a leading Likud politician, portrayed the four-sided challenge as a rehearsal for September, when the Palestinian Authority expects the U.N. General Assembly declare a sovereign ‘Palestine.’ I go further and predict that this cross of civil disobedience and low-grade violence will be the Palestinians' favored tactic for some time to come. I also predict that it will fail if, as today, a death toll ensues. But it can do real damage to Israel if the leadership manages to keep the crowds non-violent. This may have also been what Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak was getting at when he warned of this mass assault upon Israeli sovereignty: ‘we are just at the start of this matter and it could be that we'll face far more complex challenges.’ There does indeed appear to be no end to the ingenuity of those who, inflamed and encouraged by a west consumed by the political equivalent of auto-immune disease, believe that their infernal goal is now within their grasp. ==========================================================Appropriate activity for Genocide Day
Today Israel faced invasion from three borders: thousands tried to storm the borders from Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, along with Arab rampages in east Jerusalem.From the Spectator blog
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