Smokescreen revisited

Due to my lack of rigour with regard to ‘tagging’ I know I have missed zillions of postings concerning Yolande Knell, but suffice it to say that there are 34 tagged as such on this blog alone, and a similar search brought up several on Biased BBC from 2011, although I’m pretty sure  earlier ones exist somewhere in the ether.

B-BBC 2012

B-BBC 2011

B-BBC 2012

B-BBC 2012

B-BBC 2012

B-BBC 2011

I’m telling you this because of a below the line remark on a BBC Watch post that I’m about to expand upon in a minute. 

Michael says: “when you begin to talk about Knell’s interview, it would be better to give readers a little background on Knell. New people here may not know who she is.”

So the Knell-related preamble was directed at anyone who doesn’t know what we BBC bias nerds think of Yolande Knell, and for anyone New. (Hello.)

It has always struck me that the BBC positions people like Knell solely on the ‘Palestinian’ side of the violent confrontations with Israel it reports - those it chooses to report, that is, because much Palestinian-instigated aggression goes unreported by the BBC. (Click on the link and scroll down for the full effect.)

Here, I’m talking about 'the Palestinian side' in a geographical as well as an ideological sense. We get the human interest angle, the bird’s eye view, the scene that’s looking at Israel from the other side of the fence where malign Israeli forces appear to be spying on us from menacing Nazi-era watchtowers and occasionally taking pot-shots at innocent Palestinian bystanders just for the hell of it.

Another stranger-than-a-mere-coincidence phenomenon is that, particularly on the radio, the voices of Israeli officials are made to sound even more remote due to a mysterious technical aberration that suddenly interferes with the sound; a sort of hollow echo that makes them sound mechanical, robotic and other-worldly.   

These things all happened during the recent reporting of the March of Return / Friday of the Tire or whatever slogan the Hamas marketing department thought would go down well with the cannon-fodder it was designed to inspire.

The one I blogged recently, starring Chris Mason  which I titled “Smokescreen” and a TV version featuring a little more of Yolande Knell and her Interviewee. 

I’m returning to this partly because BBC Watch has fleshed out the details that I failed to provide. This is because Hadar Sela knows much more than I do about such things, and I imagine not everyone has the appetite for the minutiae of hostilities between hostile neighbouring villages pre 1948.

The first point that cannot be emphasised enough is how ludicrous and unrealistic the concept of the March for the Right of Return actually is. The Right of Return is not the same thing as the Law of Return as decreed by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922. The latter provides a safe haven for peoples of Jewish heritage when, for example, Jeremy Corbyn turns Britain into The Weimar Republic, whereas the former is a parody of it, purely intended to hasten the progress of Israel’s destruction. Perhaps the BBC doesn’t see the distinction.

There may be a case for compensating any legitimate property owners amongst the original refugees that fled or were displaced in 1948, but the concept of a Right of Return of millions of their descendants is a non-starter. The Arabs started the war, they lost the war, and as yet the Palestinians haven’t shown the ability to create anything worthy of being respected as a viable future state. The march is a stunt and a declaration of Hamas’s determination never to reach a peaceful “two-state” solution. 

As BBC Watch points out, the sister of this confusion is the concept of Ancestral Lands. The idea seems to be that if the Jews refer to their “Ancestral Home’ so can the Palestinians, but these are different things.  The Jews are alluding to their 3,000 year old association with the region, their one and only  ancestral homeland, whereas when the BBC says:  “what Palestinians see as their ancestral lands” they don’t explain that in order to qualify for refugee status, one only had to claim a mere minimum of two years of residency in Mandate Palestine. That muddies the situation considerably, and doesn’t take into account a factor, which might be classed as ‘whataboutery’,  but the truth is that an even larger number of Jews were driven out of Arab and North African countries and forced to leave their possessions behind whereupon they were absorbed by Israel and began new lives, not kept in camps for decades and used as political pawns. 

Not all Palestinian refugees are indigenous. Many current Palestinians classed as refugees originate from all over the place. The old Egyptian rogue Arafat was from Egypt, for example, and it’s thought that the well-known Tamimi propaganda machine originates from the Abu Tamim tribe in Saudi. The Ancestral Lands theme is another parody of a legitimate Israeli one; arguably a counterfeit concept borrowed from a genuine one.

BBC Watch also highlights the “forcibly displaced” legend that was casually slipped into the narrative. Also, the unquestioning repetition of unverified casualty figures provided by the “Palestinian health ministry” (Hamas) which has become standard BBC practice. Sloppy and unethical.

Then - Knell’s contribution. A human interest story featuring a 72 year-old Palestinian man, retired English teacher Ahmed Abdullah. BBC Watch provides the context that Yolande Knell leaves out, and poses a loaded question shaped to receive a specific answer.

“When the Israelis say it’s just Hamas that’s trying to stir up violence…”

I addressed that in my earlier post, but at the time I didn’t have the will to tussle with the rest of the item, which included Chris Mason interviewing the head of the political NGO B’tselem about his organisation’s call for Israeli soldiers to disobey orders, as unrepresentative as, say, Russia Today inviting Jeremy Corbyn to give the definitive assessment of Theresa May’s response to the Skripal incident.

Then we heard an IDF spokesperson speaking from within a echoing dungeon, no doubt an ante-room to the burning Hell of Hades.