Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative

(or if it’s anything to do with Israel, eliminate the positive and accentuate the negative)

Of all the media coverage of ‘Ariel Sharon the man’ I’ve looked at today, I don’t think the BBC’s has been the most biased. Yesterday they dwelt far too much on the bitter reactions of Israel’s enemies, though there are some grudging attempts at balance, frequently qualified by those obligatory ‘buts’.

I understand there are individual BBC Twitterers who would have it otherwise. No balance and no buts.

The comparison between the overall coverage of Sharon’s life and death and Mandela’s hasn’t gone unremarked. Where Mandela’s dodgy past was airbrushed out of the narrative, Sharon’s (arguable) violations were given undue prominence, in some cases overshadowing everything else.

It was chilling and creepy that Jack Straw chose ‘not to speak evil about the recently departed’ when he was questioned by Andrew Marr this morning. No doubt he’s going to wait until the coast is clear before telling us what he really thinks.

The absence of any nuanced or contextualised understanding of the predicaments Sharon faced throughout his political and military career has allowed myths and memes to take over the asylum. 

However, who is interested? Not many, and the bravado in a snippy one-liner is enough for one smug commenter below the Telegraph’s obit. He has interposed the thread again and again with: “Sabra and Shatila” or “Sabra and Shatila massacre”. 

The  Kahan Commission found Sharon indirectly responsible for not preventing Phalangist forces from murdering Muslim civilians as well as terrorists in the refugee camps. 

“It had been estimated that there may have been up to 200 armed men in the camps working out of the countless bunkers built by the PLO over the years, and stocked with generous reserves of ammunition.”

This incident didn’t take place in isolation. There was a long and bloody build-up, as there always is, but the buck has to stop somewhere and Sharon took responsibility and resigned from his position as Minister of Defence.

The other myth that has embedded itself in the minds of the masses is that Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount ‘sparked off’ the second intifada. Arafat’s own wife Suha, she of the Arafat poisoning farrago, stated that the intifada was already in the pipeline, and hubby had ordered her to scarper  before things got rough. She probably had her own motive for saying this, but she did say it.

So yes, Sharon was involved in incidents that wouldn’t look good ‘outwith’ a war situation. But so are all soldiers, everywhere, and some are reprimanded and others are not.

However fair and honest these obituaries and ‘life of the man’ stories aim to be, the selectivity in emphases shows exactly where the reporter is coming from and whose side he or she is on. The myths bear no relation to ‘fair‘ or ‘honest’,  and Honest Reporting’s choice of title for its article seems to be asking quite a lot of the public.    “Debunking the Media Myths”.

 If ‘debunk’ is defined in its strictest sense: “expose the falseness or hollowness of (an idea or belief).” then that is indeed an accurate description of what-it-says-on-the-tin. However,  if the implication is that exposing the falseness and hollowness of an idea or belief is the same thing as changing hearts and minds, they’re on the long and windy road to nowhere.

Sharon never pretended to be a saint, and his admirers don’t claim he was one. Remarkable men rarely are, and that includes Mandela.

Update.

I’m afraid Jeremy Bowen has just managed to tip the balance. The BBC has caught up with the worst of the media in the league table of anti-Israel bias with Bowen’s report  on tonight’s ten o’clock news.

The report was supposed to be about Ariel Sharon’s lying in state, but  Bowen slipped in more information about the vengeful feelings of the Palestinians than anything whatsoever from the Israeli point of view. 

A brief interview with Mr. Olmert was followed by shots of Bowen’s unintelligent-looking head, regurgitating ancient grievances through the tired old Palestinian Muslim prism that Bowen is wedded to. He ended with  that vague one-size-fits-all accusation that Jenny Tonge likes to bandy about. “What he has done to them”. We may never know exactly what that is. It’s probably protected on the grounds of being held in private for the purposes of journalism, art or literature

Assorted observations

In the wake of all those uplifting pro-immigration stories and items featuring irreproachable Bulgarian and Romanian professional individuals who intend coming here, or who are here already, I was stunned when a little upcoming item on local BBC TV was trailed....... “How easy it is for immigrants to claim welfare.” The link has disappeared from the BBC iPlayer (it was there earlier) so you'll have to take my word for it.

“They call this country 'a field of wonders!' ” At least I'm pretty sure that’s what this Russian interpreter who helped them apply for their benefits said. However, the item quickly reverted to type, and we were swiftly put right and assured that immigration has a net benefit.

***

“You forgot my name!” laughed Sarah Montague one October morning when, after momentarily hesitating, Gary Richardson, who had indeed forgotten her name,  blurted out “Mishal”.

 “I’m the new one” joked Mishal, who was indeed the new one. This mishap must have been considered newsworthy because it occurred ‘live on national radio’ as people on reality TV are apt to say when they’re suddenly overcome with awe at the magnitude of their own exposure. 

Incidentally Ms. Husain the only one who pronounces her name authentically, as in Mishal with the emphasis on the ‘Mi’ rather than the ‘al’, because I have noticed that her colleagues call her “Michelle” with the emphasis on the non existent ‘elle.‘ 

Is this a kind of reverse variation of ‘going native’ as in Yolande Knell’s vernacular pronunciation of ‘Ramull-llah’? 

They say Michelle, she says Mishal, let’s call the whole thing a figment of my imagination. 

***

Another figment, perhaps of my imagination, made me feel uneasy that the story about Israel deporting Gary Spedding, the youthful looking  pro Palestinian blogger and social media activist occupied such a prominent, some might say disproportionate, position in today’s BBC headlines. 

Spedding has form, and in the light of the recent hooha over Caroline Criado-Perez and those threatening and intimidating tweets that Craig mentioned, as well as the plethora of television channels entirely devoted to suspicious people being held at airports all over the world and sent straight back from whence they came, one might think the BBC would understand why Israel decided he was a damned nuisance and sent him packing, rather than acting all outraged at Israel’s rejection of the trouble-making little pest.  Neither the BBC nor Sky are as judgmental as ‘Pick TV’ I suppose.

***

Ever since the deterioration in his health was announced, people who support Israel have been bracing themselves for a tsunami of unflattering obituaries of Ariel Sharon. Think of the adulation that was showered upon another political icon who passed away after a protracted illness not so long ago. All the unsavory bits were edited out of his past and unadulterated adulation reigned  supreme. 

Think of that in reverse, and you’ve got the idea. Jeremy Bowen went straight to a wizened Palestinian who had suffered at the hands of Sharon way back, for his opinion. All the allegations against Sharon were dragged out as we knew they would be. 

***

Craig mentioned that interview with Diane Abbott and the sharp-suited man with a toffee eclair hairdo. The expressions on Diane’s face were a picture. Here’s but three.

The champagne socialists in her party pretended they sincerely believed that abolishing private schools would automagically make state schools better, which nobody fell for because we all knew that inverted snobbery and the politics of envy was the real reason.

 The thing about Diane is that she knew her local state schools were crap, so she sent her child to a private school. (Good for her.) 

There were a few champagne socialists like Jonathan Miller who sacrificed their children for their principles, and there was Diane who sacrificed her principles for her child. Which one would you choose?