The Expertise of ‘Arry Batwan

For day-to-day examples of the BBC’s inadequate reporting of Middle East related news and politics, look at BBCWatch. It’s making a fine job of picking up on the BBC’s damaging and dangerous anti-Israel reporting. The level of ignorance amongst the BBC-educated public is staggering. It’s displayed with panache on every forum and comment arena, where falsehoods and bigotry seem to be the only arguments available to the baying pro Palestinian mob that the BBC has had a hand in creating.

During the latest hostilities BBCWatch has spotted overtly biased reporting and Tweeting by Jon Donnison, Wyre Davies, Paul Danahar and of course Jeremy Bowen, whose analyses are increasingly fact-free and based on the kind of idle speculation anyone who has a mild interest in the subject might come up with.

Then there’s Ben Brown and Peter Allen of radio 5, not to mention various unnamed authors of articles on the BBC Website.

Jon Donnison’s recent error, publishing a photograph said to depict a child in Gaza  injured by an Israeli strike, which turned out to be a Syrian child, injured in Syria, in a Syrian hospital, by one feckless Syrian fighter or another. 

Donnison issued a cursory, unconvincing apology. He might have felt able to justify it, as did Charles Enderlin of France 2 TV  who promoted the Al Dura film, on the grounds that “We know this sort of thing happens, so what does it matter whether it’s accurate or not?”

There have been several mis-labeled images on the BBC for that matter.

It’s almost pointless bothering with accuracy at all if the BBC has already pre-judged the situation. They already know everything there is to know. Why not save the license payers’ money and stay at home spouting anti-Israel rhetoric sprinkled with film-clips of injured civilians from the BBC’s cache of Palestinian stringers and cameramen. Or take some from the library.

We’ve had to endure endless pro Palestinian pundits giving their opinion on the BBC. On radio 4 Today 8:55. we had unadulterated bile from notorious liar Abdel Bari Atwan, who Humphrys continually spoonerised as Abdel Ari Batwan. (heh) 

Who but Abdel Ari Batwan knew that the Palestinians had renounced terrorism? 

The BBC is particularly fond of consulting the expertise of Abdel al-Bari Atwan. He’s constantly on our screens dispensing his pearls of poison on his favourite topic, Israel’s unwelcome presence in the Middle East; in fact its existence.  His speciality is fantasizing about Israel being nuked. 

In August 2011 he was on T.V. endorsing the attacks on Israelis near Eilat .

‘The Eilat operation, as I see it, corrected the course of the Arab revolutions and refocused them on the most dangerous disease, namely the Israeli tyranny. This disease is the cause of all the defects that have afflicted the region for the past 65 years…’ 

To call Atwan, or as I now like to think of him, ‘Arry Batwan, an ‘expert’ on the Middle East is highly misleading, and extremely economical with the actualité. 

On Today, near the end of the programme, Humphrys announced in sonorous, innuendo-laden tones that the editor of the Times of Israel had ”declined our invitation to talk on the programme” A few seconds later he had to say “He’s now able to talk” and a jolly good job David Horovitz made of it, too.