Thursday, May 11, 2006
Martin Walker in the Times of London:
This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC’s greatest hits — or perhaps misses — remain fresh in the memory. There was the hagiographic send-off for Yassir Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which called him a “hero” and “an icon” and concluded that the corrupt old brute was “the stuff of legends”.
There was Orla Guerin’s unforgettably inventive spin on the story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as “Israel’s cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes”.
There was the disturbing case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were “waging the campaign shoulder to shoulder together with the Palestinian people”. Pressed for an explanation, the subsequent BBC statement said: “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.”
There was the extraordinarily naive coverage of the London visit of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, the predominant imam of Mecca, to open London’s largest new mosque. He was described as a widely respected religious figure who works for “community cohesion”, and a video on the BBC website was captioned “The BBC’s Mark Easton: ‘Events like today offer grounds for optimism’.”
The BBC must have missed his sermon of February 1, 2004, that said “the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels . . . calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers . . . the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs . . . These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption . . .”
These are isolated examples, but they stick longer in the memory because they are reinforced by a broader pattern of coverage that seems to play down that Israel is a democracy that elects Israeli Arabs to the Knesset and which does not engage in systematic terrorism and suicide bombing of civilians...
Regarding the BBC's under-reporting of Palestinian fatalities, Martin Walker writes:
"The Palestinian fatalities vary widely. Some are killed in internal feuds between Hamas and Fatah, and some are executed as “collaboratorsâ€, some are terrorists caught in the act and some are the victims of Israeli targeted killings. These tend to be the ones that result in the tragic collateral killing and wounding of civilians and children.
It occurred to me that the under-reporting of these deaths may be even further evidence of pro-Palestinian bais.
After all, if many of these deaths result from internal feuds, execution orders by Hamas or the PLO, or the irresponsible exposure of civilians to danger, they won't win the Palestinian side much sympathy. So, the Palestinian leadership would probably not want the details of these fatalities to be trumpeted across the media. In a sense, the under-reporting of deaths like these may really be a way of giving the Palestinian leadership a break.
I don't understand how the BBC board of governors could be so obtuse.
No doubt. Reporting of Palestinian corruption, internal feuding, murding, honor killing...you name it...is all under-reported. If there isn't a way to blame the Israelis, it's not newsworthy.
Joanne (and Mel):
Lots of Arabists in the BBC as well as the British civil service, elected office and academia with "noble savage" view of the Palestinians and rather anti-semetic sentiments toward Ashkenazic Jews. (and probably don't know that Jews also come in Sephardic, Yemenite, Persian and Indian variants)