Irresponsible reporting

The first shot from the BBC was fired on the Today programme, when for no obvious reason we were treated to the staggering information that Mira Bar-Hillel. “Is never going to go back to Israel.” 

“What a calamity” is what I don’t think many Israelis will be saying.

Paul Adams began an episode of From Our Own Correspondent by painting an emotive picture. His impression of leaving Gaza was reminiscent of a mawkish article by the unequivocally pro Palestinian Jon Snow. A piece of sentimental propaganda so flagrant that it prompted Harry’s Place’s excessively tolerant Sarah AB to make a complaint to Channel 4.

Adams uses poetic language to describe Gaza: “The same crowded impoverished streets, disintegrating slowly in the humid mediterranean heat.” 

In Adams’s Hades, Satan is Israel, a devilish entity that fails to send sufficiently generous truckloads of food, medicine and essentials into Gaza whilst Hamas’s head honchos concentrate on the pressing matter of misappropriating shedloads of cash and buying up real estate for their families.

“The same filth, the same dust, the same sense of claustrophobia”  Adams  continues lyrically. Shouldn’t he, though, be addressing that message to billionaires Meshaal and Haniya?

“Back then I remember meeting refugees who told me of their plight back in 1948, from what is now Israel.”

Yep.The same filth, the same dusty “Palestinian narrative”, the same sense of Judeophobia.

“Perhaps that’s why some of them are seized with such a furious desire to tunnel out and seek revenge.”  

‘perhaps that’s why”  looks like an outrageous justification of the kind of “revenge” that amounts to killing Jews. We know that’s why many of the tunnels had exits inside kibbutz dining rooms and kindergartens. 

“Gaza is a prison surrounded by walls, a watchtower and the most sophisticated military in the Middle East etc etc..... “they used to have an airport , which was bulldozed when the second intifada broke out”

That seems to imply that those pesky intifadas tend to ‘break out’ spontaneously and spoil everything.

   

“It would be wrong to think that this prison, 66 years in the making, is full only of the innocent. There are men of violence here,  men who will never ever accept Israel’s right to exist in the land they still regard as theirs. Men who will store weapons in Mosques and schools and take great pride in launching almost indiscriminate rockets in the midst of populated areas, hoping, in the name of resistance, to cause death and fear on the other side.”

“hoping, in the name of resistance, to cause death and fear” sounds distinctly like “terrorism”

No-one could have the heartlessness to assert that the Palestinians’ situation is not dire, appalling, that innocent people are not suffering and dying. Many would also accept that they were unknowingly sacrificing themselves and their children for the sole purpose of protecting Hamas officials, their weapons, and prosecuting their self-defeating Jihad. 

Is it really necessary for the BBC and the other MSM to keep emphasising, context-free, all this suffering and little else? It’s as if they know that showing death and misery often enough, describing it in the most graphic terms, using emotive, poetic language will make it more demonstrably, more undeniably, Israel’s fault because that’s where the Jew-haters want the fault to lie, so they can gratify their lust for brotherly loathing and wallow in the cosy enjoyment of blaming Israel.

Before the media went overboard with their morgue footage, some people had started to come to their senses. They suspected that Hamas was responsible for the situation. They reasoned, if Hamas stopped sending rockets, Israel would cease retaliating. They saw that the tunnels were not shelters for civilians, but for Jihad. Some people even suspected that exploiting civilians was a deliberate Hamas strategy, and saw that Hamas was clearly playing the Media, as they say, ‘like a violin’. 

This is something which Paul Adams all but admits. However, a few graphic images later and the media has successfully beckoned most of the audience back to square one. 

The antisemitic atmosphere is now palpable. I missed radio 4‘s Any Questions, but Any Answers was chaired by the woefully ill-prepared Anita Anand. She obviously knew less than the ill-informed Jew haters that phoned in to flaunt their antisemitism.

“Is criticism of Israel automatically antisemitic?” goes the loaded question. Well not automatically. Only when people who who have acquired the notoriously dangerous ‘a little knowledge’ spout a patently distorted, unfeasible perversion of history, then yes, criticism of Israel is antisemitic.  

It is antisemitic because people have decided to swallow, lock, stock and jackboot, the ahistorical theory that holocaust survivors in 1948 “illegally” drove 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes, at gunpoint, ‘stole their land’ and moved into their houses. 

If this tale contains a grain of truth, it pales into insignificance when you remember that around 800,000 Jews from Arab and North African countries were divested of all their worldly possessions and thrown out, and with no material assets were absorbed into a then struggling Israel.   

There is no documentary evidence to support the alleged violent displacement of Arabs by Jews on any grand scale; that feat was achieved solely by the Arab leadership.   On the other hand there is documentary and anecdotal evidence attesting to the fact that in 1948 the Jews asked their Arab neighbours to stay put. Eyewitness accounts say Arab leaders told frightening stories about Jews and advised their gullible subjects to stand aside while they swiftly exterminated the Jews, after which they could return to their houses. 

The surrounding Arab armies attacked and unexpectedly lost. The Israelis won. The Arabs who stayed in Israel became Israelis and the Arabs who fled became perpetual refugees. Why? Because, as Paul Adams knows, the Islamic Arabs loathe Jews and will never accept their presence in the area they have decreed “Palestinian land”. 

The Palestinian refugees play a pivotal role in persuading the world that Islamic Arabs have a moral duty to dismantle the Jewish State and annihilate Jewish Israelis. 

The Palestinian refugees are kept permanently stateless and jobless by their Arab brothers, whose manufactured outrage purports to be in their name; meanwhile the Hamas leadership organises days of rage and directs the Jihad from the safety of luxury hotels in Qatar, syphoning off millions of dollars of aid-money to fund their lifestyle. 

The Palestinians demand the end of the blockade and an end to the occupation, and they say they want access to jobs and medical treatment. Can they have forgotten that they had all that before Hamas came and upset the apple cart? Has the world forgotten why the blockade and the occupation exist? Not really.  They just don’t want to know.

People who phoned in to Any Answers armed with little a bit of history will be quite aware that in parallel to the particular “narrative” they’ve grasped, there’s a counter narrative they’ve decided to ignore.  A choice of their own free will has led them to parrot the Arab/ Islam rejection of Israel’s presence in the imaginary Palestinian-only Land, and suddenly they find themselves defending the Mullahs of  Iran, the Assad-supporting Hezbollah and the Islamist Hamas. So, yes they are antisemitic.

British and European Muslims are parading, rioting and attacking, and the media’s grossly biased reporting is largely responsible.  No, make that irresponsible.