More questions for the BBC

There's a cryptic report on the BBC News website today headlined West Lancashire Labour councillor suspended over Keir Starmer tweet. 

All it tells us is that Labour councillor Ron Cooper has been suspended from the Labour Party because of “an offensive remark about current Labour leader Mr Starmer”. 

Now, there may be good reasons why the BBC isn't even hinting at the nature of what Mr Cooper said but I can't guess them. 

Meanwhile, Twitter has spend all afternoon filling in the gaps and raising questions:

• FurnessGirl: This is disgraceful from BBC News! The "offensive remark” about Keir Starmer alleged that he follows “commands from Israel”. THAT is the reason for his suspension.
• David Paxton: What a very odd way of reporting that.
• leekern: Hey BBC, why in the hell have you omitted the fact that this Labour councillor was suspended for antisemitic remarks? Why have you changed it to “offensive” & not even reported what was said? I’ll tell you why: cos your office is filled with sly c**** with consciously anti-Jewish bias. It takes conscious, pro-active effort on the part of the journalist to misrepresent the story in this way.
• Clare Quilty: They're obviously defending the line that criticism of Israel isn't antisemitic, which in this case means that saying Starmer takes his orders from Israel is not antisemitic. The BBC needs to adopt IHRA.
• Becky Aizen: They’re clearly trolling us at this point. 

UPDATE [17:15]: I was just about to add a bit of speculation that the piece was possibly written by a BBC Corbynista and point out that the article also called the Labour leader 'Keir Starmer' and 'Mr Starmer' and didn't call him 'Sir Keir' when the BBC preempted me by posting an update. 

The headline has just changed to West Lancashire Labour councillor suspended over Sir Keir Starmer tweet and 'Mr Starmer' is replaced by 'Sir Keir Starmer'.

And, yes, a line has been added:

The tweet added: "Keir Starmer stands for nothing but purge of socialists and following commands from Israel."

Someone at the BBC News website has evidently taken note of the criticism and [stealthily] 'staged an intervention'.