Mishal Husain must have banked a mountain of footage while she was in Gaza. It must be piling up in the bowels of the BBC, waiting to be suitably edited and slowly drip-fed to viewers, lest we are distracted by Brexit and forget how awful Israel is. (“sorry this episode is not currently available”)
So Gaza’s hospitals are suffering from terrible shortages. No money. No medicine. No electricity. No water. No medical equipment. And all because of Israel’s blockade or siege. Admittedly there was a fleeting reference to squabbles between Hamas and the PA, but the overriding message is that the architect of all this misery is the State of Israel.
Why would this comparatively narrow field of interest occupy a British team of reporters (when, for example, there’s so much else going on in our own “any chess”) while conspicuously failing to explore the vexed question of what has happened to the shedloads of aid that the rest of the world has been pouring into the place?
Any tuppenny ha'penny media outfit could string together a mawkish, misery-memoir documentary that merely serves to inflame and incite; but how lazy, how incurious and one-sided does it have to be before it’s seen as blatantly partisan agitprop?
Pushing the agenda further, they drag it out again next day on the Today Programme. After hearing from UNWRA director Matthias Schmale, who has been experiencing some local difficulties of his own recently, Mishal Husain adopted her scornful schoolmarm voice to interrogate Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev.
Obviously, all deaths and injuries are tragic and regrettable, and maybe the IDF has (understandably) got too used to defending itself (and Israel’s civilian citizens) preemptively. But needs must.
Mishal was pursuing the point that people were being shot at “inside the fence” and using the example of a fourteen-year-old boy who was shot and killed by the IDF. Why is Israel shooting innocent fourteen-year-old children who are peacefully protesting? (or words to that effect) fires Mishal at Mr Regev. The child only “put his hand on the top to the fence”, and bingo, a trigger-happy IDF soldier shot him dead. (Why would anybody put their hand ‘on the top’ of the fence’ if not to climb over it? Must peaceful protesters only be repelled once they have successfully broken into Israeli territory and stabbed a Jew or two?) Are their intentions not explicit enough?
Of course, the Hamas-orchestrated protests were deliberately constructed to make Israel look ‘bad’ at the expense of sacrificial fourteen-year-old boy martyrs. In taking her stance, Mishal Husain only encourages Hamas to dream up more such stunts, as they obviously bear fruit, exactly as intended.
“I’ve been there” she bragged. “So have I” retorted Regev. “I was on one side and you were on the other” she replied.
Indeed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002220#playt=2h22m59s
I referenced this on the open thread.
ReplyDeleteI noted amongst other things - she referred to Palestinians being at "the boundary", not the border. That I take to be implicit recognition of Hamas's claims to the land of Israel, a UN member state. Also I am pretty sure that in her TV report she referred to only the Israeli blockade whereas in her radio report the next she she more correctly referred to both the Egyptian and Israeli blockades.
I also noted that she seems to take no interest in the many more deaths from Islamic terrorism (over 1000 in 2017) in her family's homeland of Pakistan. Odd that. I don't think I've ever seen a follow up on BBC to a terrorist attack in Pakistan showing, months or years later, the patients in agony from their injuries and receiving sub-standard medical care. Whereas we have had many ,many items like Husain's focussing blame on Israel rather than the true villains - the terrorist organisation Hamas.
Husain also makes out the protestors are not closely linked to Hamas, whereas the most militant of them definitely are.
Definitely the tv report only mentioned the Israe blockade, I posted about it on BiasedBBC. In fact, I was just apoplectic throughout her whole tv report. No mention of the millions of pounds/ dollars used to buy cement for tunnels, money which could be used for medicines; no mention that Israel used to allow ambulances to pass through the blockade for Gazans to get treatment in Israel until they found terrorists and guns being smuggled in that way, no questions about the recent thousands of home made rockets recently launched into Israel, nor did Mishal show concern for the environment with all those burning tyres (perhaps the last one is just too optimistic but could you imagine if it were Israel producing all that carbon into the atmosphere?
DeleteYes it was thinly disguised hate speech.
DeleteIndeed - it was a woefully (but alas not surprisingly) one-eyed report.
ReplyDeleteThis point is spot on: "In taking her stance, Mishal Husain only encourages Hamas to dream up more such stunts, as they obviously bear fruit, exactly as intended."
I hope you're reading this Mishal: when more Palestinian kids die after being pushed into deliberately dangerous and provocative roles by their evil Hamas handlers, some of their blood will be on your hands and the hands of those like you.
Why is a fourteen-year-old allowed by his parents or other responsible adults to try to climb the Gaza fence and put himself in mortal danger?
ReplyDeleteOh, hang on...
Husain also didn't mention the fact that the Palestinian authorities pay the families of people killed or injured by Israeli's military response - handsomely. The families' status is also raised. All this is quite an incentive for would be Jihadists - to augment the promises of paradise.
ReplyDelete