A Christmas BBC tradition continues

I meant to point this out yesterday, but life intervened - and, anyway, BBC Watch in on the case. 

Yes, yesterday's From Our Own Correspondent featured a little bit of festive Israel-bashing and a complementary article has appeared on the BBC News website too.

BBC Watch has been forensic about it. I'll confine myself to summing it up like this: There are shepherds abiding in the fields and a pregnant Mary-like villager, and they're unhappy, and it's all (Herod's) Israel's fault.

This is nothing new. Here's me in 2015:

Some Christmas traditions - decking the halls with boughs of holly; singing old carols; eating, drinking and being merry; complaining that Christmas has become too commercialised; watching The Queen and Morecambe and Wise, etc - have been around for many a long year now. Others are more recent, such as BBC Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell's pre-Christmas piece from Bethlehem where she uses the Christmas story to paint Israel as the modern-day Herod.

And here's me in 2017:

One of the BBC's hallowed Christmas Eve traditions is their now yearly piece from Bethlehem about how hard-done-by those poor Palestinian shepherds abiding in the fields (or in concrete buildings) are thanks to those horrible Herod-like Israelis.

The BBC chap responsible year is one Jeremy Bristow. In recent years, as noted above, it's largely been Yolande Knell's job to do the 'Shepherds abiding/Israel's to blame' story, but she's away on maternity leave thus Christmas (h/t Hadar at BBC Watch). So that's why Barbara Plett Usher did the Bethlehem gig this year.