"Imagine"

I hope I’m not turning into one of those people who think anyone they disagree with shouldn’t be allowed to air their views on the BBC. You know, the sort of no-platforming that Israel-bashers wish upon persons with the temerity to speak for Israel. Mark Regev used to draw a lot of that when he was the spokesman for the Israeli government. The very sound of his name or the sight of his face drew avalanches of indignant letters of complaint insisting that ‘having him on’ was just wrong.

So now here’s a slightly similar complaint about Chris Gunness of UNRWA. 

There were two occasions in one single edition of the Today Programme. (Today) here and here, where Gunness was given the opportunity to vent his spleen.

The first time, at about seven thirty am, took the form of a conversation between Mr. Gunness and John Humphrys, and the second, at around ten minutes to nine, was a repeat of a chunk of Gunness’s agitated rant followed by a conversation between Justin Webb and Lt-Col Peter Lerner.

The reason I object to hearing Chris Gunness's lengthy, emotional and uninterrupted rant is that he has significant 'history', which should really have discredited him in the eyes of both the UN and the BBC.  We’ve written extensively about this over the years, (both myself and Alan formerly of the Biased-BBC website) and we’ve linked to various articles that set out the case against exBBC employee Gunness.

He is incapable of giving an impartial or a rational account of anything to do with the Israeli - Palestinian conflict. Not only does he have a visceral hatred of Israel, but he has lied about protecting Hamas’s habit of secreting weapons on UNWRA premises. His favourite mantra is that Israel is guilty of committing war crimes. It’s very tiresome to hear him doing the same old thing, over and over again. The following excerpts are from Tom Gros's Mideast Dispatch Archive, c 2014

“But what the BBC and many other media are failing to tell their audiences is that earlier today – under pressure from Israel and the U.S. – the UN agency UNRWA admitted that 20 Hamas rockets (of the kind used to kill Israeli civilians) have been stored at an UNRWA school in Gaza. This is, of course, not news to people who follow the region closely – Hamas has for years stored its arsenals, and fired rockets at Israel, from hospitals, schools, ambulances, mosques and the like, in multiple breaches of international law. It’s just that journalists for many western news outlets deliberately don’t tell their audiences this. 

UNRWA is the western-funded, Gaza-based, primarily Palestinian-staffed agency which supplies very dubious figures about the number of civilian deaths in Gaza (classifying some militants as civilians) – figures which are then unquestionably accepted and rebroadcast by many in the international media, such as the New York Times, without any regard for UNRWA’s past track record of libeling Israel. 

Today’s statement, which UNRWA took a full 24 hours to release, while robust, is less than fully truthful. 

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness is a British citizen, who previously worked for 23 years as a foreign correspondent and in senior editorial positions at the BBC and has a decades-long record of bias against Israel. Gunness is close friends with the BBC’s notoriously anti-Israel “chief Middle East correspondent” Jeremy Bowen.”

REVEALED: UNRWA SPOKESMAN WHO LIED ABOUT ISRAEL PREVIOUSLY WORKED AT THE BBC WITH JEREMY BOWEN

I have previously outlined on this website the concoctions of the well-funded UN body UNRWA which have resulted in defamations of Israel and physical attacks on Jews in many different countries around the world. 

For example, UNRWA has now admitted that their claim that Israel shelled a school in Gaza in January and killed 32 Palestinian civilians is completely false. The shell in question, it turns out, was in response to Palestinian mortar fire at civilians in Israel and killed nine Palestinian adults, none of whom were in the school. Seven of those killed were armed operatives and two were civilians. 

The sensational and false claims of UNRWA led to headlines around the world such as “UN accuses Israel of herding 110 Palestinians into a house then shelling it, leaving 30 dead” (London Daily Mail Online UK, Jan 9 2009 11:59AM GMT). 

The false reports led to anti-Israel riots and attacks on Jews in all six continents of the world.

 A JOINT WAR CRIMES ALLEGATION BY UNRWA AND THE BBC

Now, it turns out that Chris Gunness, the UNWRA spokesman who went on several different international TV networks in January to accuse Israel of “war crimes” on account of the supposed school incident, is in fact a former BBC journalist and a close colleague of the BBC’s notoriously anti-Israel Chief Jerusalem Correspondent Jeremy Bowen. 

In a diary article which Jeremy Bowen posted on BBC online, he states:
“I just broke off writing for a couple of minutes to take a call from Chris Gunness, who is the spokesman for Unrwa, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees.
“He was ringing to say that Unrwa wanted an investigation into whether Israel has committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Civilians are protected by the laws of war.
“I have known Chris for years, as he used to be a BBC foreign correspondent. He wanted to make sure that we knew he was using the phrase for the first time. He said that the attack this morning on a UN school in Gaza looked as if it was a war crime.”


I revealed Gunness’ close friendship with Bowen in a dispatch in 2009, here. 

Nor is the BBC finding space in its attacks on Israel this hour, to mention that Israel thwarted a major terror attack this morning involving 13 Hamas gunmen who infiltrated into Israel by underground tunnel from Gaza.

***

I think I can rest my case. Back to this morning.

During the first airing of Gunness’s diatribe, we were treated to a selective description of the incident in which two UNWRA pupils were killed. He did not mention what brought about this airstrike, which, to listeners who may still be unaware of recent events, must at first have appeared callous and completely unprovoked. 

He proceeded to pose a list of hypothetical scenarios, inviting us to ‘imagine”  - “how you’d feel it if this (that and the other) happened in London.” In his eyes, the intolerable provocation that drew Israel’s belated retaliation simply. Hadn’t. Happened. He appears to be blind to it. He’s managed to excise it from his consciousness. A psychological deficiency no doubt; very sad for him and all that, but his inherent unreliability needs to be taken into account, especially if you’re calling upon him to make a credible contribution to the Today Programme.

John Humphrys took it upon himself to put Israel’s case on behalf of a spokesperson for the Israeli government who had pulled out of the interview, making it clear that he was able to do so because he “knew what Israel would say” and “has said”, lest any listener might mistakenly assume his interjections represented his own views.

As well as implying that the Gaza protests were peaceful, Gunness indicated that Gaza is “occupied” both of which he must know to be false. Both misleading implications remained unchallenged by Humphrys.  

Humphrys said that Israel would reject ”an independent and transparent investigation,” which is what Gunness is calling for - because "the international community hates us because we’re Israel”.  Although Humphrys made that claim sound far-fetched and a bit ridiculous, it was probably the most accurate assessment of reality that we heard during the whole conversation.

Next, Tom Bateman was brought in to tell us what the Israelis are saying about the situation, and he took up the offer - literally -  sprinkling his summary of recent events with the qualifier “Israel says”, which is the BBC’s unsubtle way planting seeds of doubt about Israel’s account of an incident and  dissociating their opinion from Israel’s at the same time.

Shortly before the end of the programme - I think it was the penultimate item, they again played a part of Chris Gunness’s speech - the bit in which he invites the listener to “imagine”. It’s a recording, so there was no chance to interact with or further challenge the speaker.However, Justin Webb got to do that with Lt-Col Peter Lerner. Without feeling the need to ask the listeners to imagine anything, he stated that Israel has been subjected to over two hundred rockets and mortars launched from Gaza.

So, let’s use the ‘imagine’ scenario for ourselves. Imagine you’re living in an Israeli town or kibbutz near the Gaza border.  Imagine hearing the chilling sound of a siren at any time of the day or night, knowing you have just a few seconds to rush your family into a bomb shelter. 

That’s enough of that. Justin was keen to put Chris Gunness’s point to Lerner - that killing children “is not a proportionate response”. You cannot allow your ability to defend yourself to be constrained because of your enemy’s cynical exploitation of children was the gist of his reply. If Hamas wanted to protect their children they shouldn’t have placed their facilities in or fired from densely populated areas. They were warned. 

Listen to Peter Learner, listen to Justin Webb’s responses, and note the irritable way he abruptly brought the interview to an end.

Maybe you didn’t realise that hundreds of ‘contraptions’ and incendiary balloons have been launched from Gaza recently, sending families into shelters, scorching acres of farmland and injuring three Israeli civilians. Fire-balloons have scorched 7,500 acres of land in Israel. Admittedly, ”no Israelis have been killed“ or hurt badly enough to satisfy the likes of Mishal Husain when she infamously demanded an unspecified number of Israeli fatalities before considering there was a case for retaliation.

On the BBC’s Middle East web page, there are a series of video reports. One is about ‘terror kites’ and another is titled: “Gaza’s deadliest day of violence” and a there's a particularly one-sided ‘backgrounder’ by Paul Adams called “Gaza, the history behind the anger.”

The selective omissions in his narrative are clearly crafted to coax the viewer towards perceiving the Palestinians as victims of a cruel and undeserved injustice. The passive-aggressive undertone implies that Israel is to blame. Here’s a transcription

“What are the people of Gaza so angry about? What would make so many young men risk their lives along the border with Israel? Israel says they are being manipulated and controlled by the militant Islamist group Hamas, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s a strip of land about 40 km long and 10 km wide along the Mediterranean coast between Egypt and Israel. The question of who controls it is complicated. It’s run by the Palestinians but Israel controls almost all the borders.” 

How did we get here? asks the caption. 

“Egypt controlled it after the 1948 war and the creation of Israel. Then, in another war in 1967 Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Pretty soon Israeli settlers moved in there and set up their own communities. They stayed there until 2005 when Israel finally decided to pull them out of Gaza, along with its soldiers. 

Who runs Gaza now? says the caption 

“Well, Hamas have been in charge for the past decade, following fighting with their more moderate rivals Fatah in 2007. The two sides have tried more than once to bury the hatchet, but the deals have always fallen apart, and so Hamas is still in control. 

What’s life like inside Gaza? questions another caption. 

“With a population of about 1.8 million people, it’s one of the most densely populated places on earth. Most of those who live here are descendants of people who fled or were driven from their homes in 1948. Many of them still live in refugee camps and after 70 years they still yearn for their homes across the fence in Israel. They describe the Gaza strip as the world’s largest open-air prison. It’s been under Israeli land, air and sea blockade ever since Hamas took over. Egypt also strictly controls its border. There are shortages of water and power, dangerously high unemployment and very little freedom to travel outside. 

How often do conflicts break out? the next caption wonders.

“Every few years it seems there’s an explosion of violence. Three major Israeli military operations since 2008 triggered in part by rockets fired into Israeli towns and cities by Hamas. Each time Israeli forces have invaded using overwhelming firepower and killing large numbers of Palestinians. Israel regards any attempt to storm the border or break holes in the fence as a red line. The government has repeatedly warned that anyone attempting to break through into Israel to commit acts of violence risks being shot dead, but Israeli human rights groups and the UN have said that the threat of violence does not in itself excuse the use of lethal force.

Context-free and juvenile, with barely a mention of militant Islam. In the BBC’s world, these wars ‘just happen’, most Israelis are ‘settlers’, Gaza is “One of the most densely populated places on earth” where old Palestinian crones waving gigantic keys  “yearn for their homes”. Too bad. Shouldn’t have started the war, shouldn’t have fled, shouldn’t have rejected Israel, shouldn’t have expelled the Jews from majority Islamic countries, shouldn’t have elected Hamas.

And the reporting!  Not just the BBC, of course.  More, the “international community.” No wonder the Israelis think they hate us “Because we’re Israel”. 

British media pummel Israel with some of the most biased headlines since 2014 https://t.co/QA3s0TPSoH pic.twitter.com/crLtkz247D

— UK Media Watch (@UKMediaWatch) July 15, 2018

Then they came for me

Does it matter if the BBC perpetuates the ever increasing anti-Israel undercurrent, which is frightening many British Jews and making them think of leaving the country?

This is a BBC bias blog,  and some of our readers might be wondering what this has to do with them. 

We’re not exclusively Zionist  - we don’t want to frighten the horses, do we - but as a generalised BBC-watching blog we stand a chance of gathering a few I/P fence-sitters as we go.  As far as the Israeli Palestinian conflict is concerned many people are so fed up with the subject that they dismiss it with an exasperated ‘plague on both your houses’.

However, even your disinterested onlooker will be aware of a growing disconnect between the man in the street and the rarified world of media and politics, specifically on returning Jihadists, the normalisation of Islamic cultural practices and the sanitisation of imported antisemitism coming from refugees and immigrants from Islamic countries.

I wasn’t aware that Tom Gross of Middle East Dispatches  was a contributor to the Spectator till I spotted his piece about the BBC’s ‘half a story’ reporting about Gaza. 

The good news about Gaza you won’t hear on the BBC

“But the BBC (which remember is under a legal duty through its charter to be impartial) and most other mainstream media, don’t show you any of this other side of Palestinian life. And unlike those people typically seen in European and American media dispatches from Gaza, in the Al-Jazeera video, almost no Palestinian interviewed even mentions Israel. Instead, they point primarily to the internal Palestinian political rift between Hamas and Fatah as being their main concern in terms of their businesses thriving. Israel barely gets a look in. What’s more, contrary to widespread opinion, Al Jazeera also shows some women without headscarves in Gaza, including businesswomen.”

I’d already seen the video about Gaza’s flourishing tourist industry - I think it’s been around for a while - not on mainstream media of course. Also from the Spectator, Gavin Mortimer’s disturbing piece about our lamentably complacent approach to returning Jihadis.

“At the root of the problem is successive governments’ superficial knowledge of political Islam and their insistence on taking advice from the wrong sort of people. The majority of the mainstream media don’t help, either, lacking the insight and honesty to confront the growing problem. Instead they try and make light of the danger, endowing our Islamists with childish nicknames like Captain Hook, Jihadi John, the White Widow and The Beatles. But if Britain doesn’t start getting a grip on this problem, the joke may eventually be on us.

Several journalists and Middle East specialists are in despair about the (predominantly British) media’s lack of appetite for pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian stories, and its even more injurious appetite for juicy, Israel-demonising ones. 

  

Kaled Abu Toamah writes for Gatestone Institute, and in this video he expresses a similar kind of frustration to that of Matti Friedman, who encountered similar difficulties while working as a journalist for Associated Press. 

You may be worried about creeping Islamisation  as is Daphne Anson in her piece about the foreign Office and “World Hijab Day”

“For the sake of pandering to the Islamic world at home and abroad the Foreign Office believes it appropriate for non-Muslim females to cover their heads in a scarf that many Muslim women themselves regard as a symbol of female subservience and which began as an indication of which women (the covered ones) were not to be considered fair game for sexual violence by Muslim men”

If you’re still wondering what antisemitism, a Jewish exodus and the potential destruction of the Jewish State has to do with you, remember 1930s Germany and that famous poem.

Tom Gross on the BBC's attitude to Israel

Here are some interesting comments about the BBC's reporting of Israel from former Daily Telegraph reporter Tom Gross, taken from an interview featured on the Israeli media site Nana 10. 

He was speaking about the mistakes made in media articles about Israel in the wake of the terrorist murders at the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem:

- Of course the media should be critical of Israel when it's deserved but they shouldn't hold Israel to a standard that they don't hold to any other country in the world, even to themselves. 

- The mistakes have a context. Often the bias is subconscious, so that people are not even aware that they're being biased. In the past there was an analysis done of mistakes in the New York Times about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Every single mistake was against Israel. Something like 17 mistakes were made against Israel. Zero mistakes were against the Palestinians. The journalists themselves and the news anchors need to try and be balanced or fair. I mean that's part of the job.

- I'm in touch which quite a lot of senior editors and I myself pointed out mistakes to them in private meetings and they kind of brushed them aside. They don't care. It's not only errors to do with today. We saw on the BBC an interview with morning with Naftali Bennett and the BBC presenter said "Take that down. Take that down. We don't want to see that picture". Now, you have to understand, the BBC this summer showed pictures of dead Palestinians day after day, hour after hour. Much worse pictures. And there is a kind of unspoken policy at the BBC that when Palestinians are victims they show the pictures in their bloodiest form but when Jews or Israelis are victims they don't want to see any pictures.

- Certainly Israeli government officials could do a better job at public relations. There's no doubt. However, the amount of coverage, the amount of attention this small country receives is out of all proportion to the size and importance of the country. So even with the best spokespeople in the world Israeli spokespeople would still have a difficult job at dealing with the sheer quantity of journalists asking questions. Part of the questions have to be asked: Why, for example, this summer, the BBC had more reporters in Gaza than they had when Britain helped to invade Iraq in 2003, and Baghdad and Basra? In other words, the BBC had more foreign reporters in Gaza than they sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in wars that British troops were fighting in. And they would say, some of them, that it's not because they are against Israel. They would say it's because they care so much about Israel. Maybe that's what they say but I have my doubts about it in many cases. 

Part one (of five short observations)

My BBC personal viewing pattern has dwindled away to practically nil. Usually small bursts of news and current affairs, and at the weekend, for a bit of masochistic morbid curiosity, Marr; if an interesting topic is on the agenda, I might take in the religious-based Sunday morning fiasco (TBQ or SML) that goes out next, and maybe a bit of Andrew Neil.

During the current Israel/Gaza flare-up there’s Channel 4(!!) ITV., Sky, BBC4 news, Al Jazeera, and even RT. But this week I have mostly been --- online, getting nicely radicalised with, e.g., the Brendan O”Neill article, which has rightly been cited everywhere because it says such a lot, also most of the staples featured on the sidebar of this blog and some others.

One website that had dropped off my radar recently - I don’t know why, is Tom Gross’s Mideast Dispatches. I used to read it all the time, I think it’s a bit too ultramarine for comfort. 

Alan at Biased BBC reminded me to revisit, so H/T to Alan. His latest  piece “Under pressure etc” was especially relevant because just the other day I asked Craig whether he’d spotted anything on the BBC, because I hadn’t, about Chris Gunness’s ‘discovery’ (what a surprise that must’ve been for poor Chris) of a score of rockets stashed away in one of his humanitarian schools. (Craig hadn’t spotted anything on the BBC either) Obviously aficionados of pro-Israel blogs already knew, but not the BBC. Either the BBC did not know or didn’t deem it newsworthy.  

I used to blog at Biased-BBC from 2009 - 2012, and Chris Gunness was no stranger to my mighty pen.  

It seems Gunness said the school was ‘vacant’, presumably to confuse, since that could mean just about anything. It could be that it was the school hols; that no-one happened to there at the time, or that the building was unused. I had forgotten that I already knew he and Jeremy Bowen were mates until I searched the B-BBC archives and found my own piece.