The BBC and the First Temple

If you go here, you can read this which was published in September 2014, the transcript of a program on Questions and answers about the discovery of King Solomon's Tablet of Stone:

What evidence is there that the Temple of Solomon existed?

The only evidence is the Bible. There are no other records describing it, and to date there has been no archaeological evidence of the Temple at all. What's more, other archaeological sites associated with King Solomon - palaces, fortresses and walled cities that seemed to match places and cities from the Bible - are also now in doubt.

There is a growing sense among scholars that most of these archaeological sites are actually later than previously believed. Some now believe there may be little or no archaeological evidence of King Solomon's time at all, and doubt that he ruled the vast empire which is described in the Bible.

Really?

From 2005:

A First-Temple period seal has been discovered amidst piles of rubble from Jerusalem's Temple Mount, an Israeli archaeologist said Tuesday, in what could prove to be an historic find.The small - less than 1 cm - seal impression, or bulla, discovered Tuesday by Bar-Ilan University archaeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkay amidst piles of rubble from the Temple Mount would mark the first time that an written artifact was found from the Temple Mount dating back to the First Temple period.The 2,600 year old artifact, with three lines in ancient Hebrew, was discovered amidst piles of rubble discarded by the Islamic Wakf...The seal, which predates the destruction of the First Jewish temple in 586 BCE, was presented Tuesday night to the press at an archaeological conference

Time passes and

A rare 3,000-year-old seal, from the time of King David in the 10th century BCE, was recently discovered by a 10-year-old Russian volunteer at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Sifting Project.  Dr. Gabriel Barkay, co-founder and director of the project – which sifts through thousands of tons of illegally removed earth from the contested holy site in 1999 by the Wakf religious trust to build a mosque – said that the finding is unprecedented.

“The seal is the first of its kind to be found in Jerusalem,” said Barkay, a world-renowned archaeologist and Israel Prize laureate, who has led the project for more than 10 years.

“The dating of the seal corresponds to the historical period of the Jebusites and the conquest of Jerusalem by King David, as well as the construction of the Temple and the royal official compound by his son, King Solomon.”

“What makes this discovery particularly significant,” Barkay continued, “is that it originated from upon the Temple Mount itself.”

The find:

And coincidentally:

A rare amulet bearing the name of the Egyptian ruler Thutmose III, Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty who reigned from 1479 – 1425 BCE, was discovered at the Temple Mount Sifting Project located in Jerusalem’s Tzurim Valley National Park.

"Thutmose III was one of the most important pharaohs in Egypt's New Kingdom and is credited with establishing the Egyptian imperial province in Canaan, conducting 17 military campaigns to Canaan and Syria and defeating a coalition of Canaanite kings at the city of Megiddo in 1457 BCE," stated Dr. Gabriel Barkay, the co-founder and director of the Temple Mount Sifting Project.

"Thutmose III referred to himself as ‘the one who has subdued a thousand cities,’ and it is known that for more than 300 years, during the Late Bronze Age, Canaan and the city state of Jerusalem were under Egyptian dominion, likely explaining the presence of this amulet in Jerusalem."

BBC needs to update its archives.

^

BBC Can't Locate "Deep Inside Israel"

In a BBC report on this evening's terror attack:-

This attack will have particularly shocked Israelis as it came not in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank but deep inside Israel itself, the BBC's Middle East correspondent Kevin Connolly points out.

Shocked?

From the official list of terror attacks this month, I can read of other locations "not in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank but deep inside Israel itself", even ignoring the slight of Jerusalem, where terror took place -


October 7

Petach Tikva: Knife attack at shopping mall wounded one man. The knife broke, preventing further victims. Bystanders apprehended the terrorist.

Kiryat Gat (southeast of Tel Aviv): A terrorist stabbed an IDF soldier and snatched his gun, then ran into a nearby apartment, where a woman was just returning home. She fought with him and managed to flee. The terrorist was killed by police.

October 8

Tel Aviv: Female soldier and three others stabbed. Terrorist was shot and killed.

Jerusalem: A yeshiva student (25) was seriously injured and another man lightly injured in stabbing attack near the light rail. Terrorist (age 19) arrested.

Afula (town in Galilee): A soldier was wounded in stabbing attack. The terrorist was apprehended soon after.​

October 9

Jerusalem (Shmuel HaNavi St.): Jewish boy (16) was beaten and stabbed and lightly injured. Attacker (18, from Hebron in West Bank) was later apprehended by police.

October 13

Raanana (northeast of Tel Aviv): Two stabbing attacks in the morning, an hour apart: The first at a bus stop in the center of town, in which a man (32) suffered light wounds; the attacker (22, from eastern Jerusalem) was subdued by passers-by and held until the police arrived. The second attack resulted in one seriously wounded and three lightly wounded; the terrorist (a construction worker at nearby Beit Levinstein) was arrested. 


Makor Baruch [actually, Geula], a religious neighborhood. Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, 59, of Jerusalem was killed and five wounded. The terrorist, who was apprehended, is a resident of the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood who holds Israeli citizenship, was an employee of Israeli phone company Bezeq, and was using a company car to commit the attack.


Does anyone at the BBC know how to look at a map?

^

So, BBC Was Unfactual All Along

The headline:

BBC strikes deal 

with PBS 

to create 

factual programmes

So, in the past they've all been unfactual programs?

^

Oiled Media Bias at the BBC

Consider this opening line:

The first time I realised how delicious olive oil from the West Bank can be was more than ten years ago when a Palestinian farmer offered me breakfast as I stood watching a broad strip of his land being destroyed.

That was the BBC's Jeremy Bowen.

Jeremy, dear chap, only ten years you've know good olive oil?

And if we're talking time-wise, that territory has been the "West Bank" only since April 1950.  Before that, for 2500 years, it was Judea and Samaria.  Judea like in where Jesus was born.  Judea like in Jews.

And the best olive oil is from Meshek Achiyah at Shiloh.

^

The BBC's Quotation Marks

The BBC love affair with quotation marks to assit hate for Israel:

Jerusalem car 'attack' kills baby at rail station    Police say the driver was a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. He was shot by officers as he tried to run away and later died of his injuries in hospital.  Officials say they are treating it as a "terrorist attack" and that the suspect had previously served time in an Israeli prison "for terrorism".

^

Dicey Doucet

After recent revelations by Israel-based journalists that bias as well as sloppy journalism works against Israel, purposefully and unintentionally, we know that the end result is the same: Israel maligned.

Now, here's an insight into BBC's thinking:

...the BBC’s chief international correspondent admits the targeting of civilians, and in particular children, she has witnessed over the past two years in Syria and Gaza has prompted “an editorial shift in my journalism”, evident in last month’s BBC2 documentary The Children of Syria. [Lyse] Doucet is already working on a follow-up based on her experience of reporting from Gaza during the Israeli onslaught this summer.
“The way the wars of our time are fought, as punishing, sustained attacks on neighbourhoods, towns, cities, means assaults on families and childhood,” Doucet says. “Most places I cover young children are everywhere, in Gaza they are pouring out of every crevice.”

She is responsible for The Children of Syria, broadcast in August, "which showed the devastating effect of the war through the prism of six different children’s experiences".

As regards her new, upcoming documentary on Gaza, she'll be taking a similar approach:

 “I keep thinking of the children, the families we spent time with there. I don’t get nightmares, but we are going back and following some of the stories.”  She is cagey about saying too much but explains: “We are trying to tell a very old Middle East story in a new way.”

This will include the impact on both sides, a method established in Children of Syria, which included two heavily politicised boys...

Doucet says she believes in being “compassionate, not emotional”, suggesting she would not go so far as Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow’s anguished online video about the children of Gaza. “Empathy is a good thing. [But viewers] don’t want to see me, or anyone falling apart. It is not about us.”

Who will be the boys in the new film and what are their politics to be is one set of questions that pops into my head.

Ms. Doucet has been problematic. And here is some insight:

"Many Israelis had been willing to pay a huge price if it meant a final end to the Gaza conflict but there is now a silent majority that now believes it is better to stop, even if the operation did not achieve all its goals," says Mr Shavit, the author of My Promised Land.  He is speaking against an idyllic backdrop of a revolving pink carousel and a few fishermen casting rods into the sea. "People want to return to the beauty of Israeli life, not its horrors."

Gazans also want lives worth living. For them, that means not just an end to this war, but also the end of a seven-year blockade to allow greater movement of goods and people through crossings into Israel and Egypt.

"People don't realise how densely populated and poor Gaza is," remarks Dov Hartuv as we stand at the furthest edge of the kibbutz that he says it is safe to go.  From that vantage point, you can see, in detail, the jagged skyline across the entire length of the Gaza Strip.

Letting people on both sides of this border live their own lives used to be seen as a more achievable goal than reaching a peace deal.  But even reaching that kind of calm seems to get ever more difficult.

Get ready.

^ 

BBC Headline Comes Up Short

BBC presumes you know who gets "killed" in the territories:

And while the lead-in sentence manages to include the word "Israeli":

A meeting between Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiators has been postponed in the wake of a killing of an Israeli in the West Bank.

Somehow, they couldn't find room for that word in the headline: 

Or perhaps they were hoping you'd think the IDF was running wild.  Or those "hilltop youth".

___________________________

Received this from a friend:

It's taken them three days and numerous versions of that same article to even get to that:

http://bbcwatch.org/2014/04/15/fatal-terror-attack-in-judea-bbc-silent/

http://bbcwatch.org/2014/04/16/route-35-terror-attack-gets-a-grand-total-of-34-words-in-bbc-report/

http://bbcwatch.org/2014/04/17/more-changes-to-bbc-website-article-on-route-35-terror-attack/ 

and a P.S.

just noticed this at the bottom:

Also on Wednesday, clashes erupted between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police at a holy site in Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary).
Reports say the violence broke out after the site was opened to visitors in the morning. The protesters began throwing stones, and the police officers responded by firing stun grenades and rubber bullets. The AFP news agency reported that dozens of protesters were hurt.

Clashes, dear BBC, do not just "erupt".  They start when, as in this case, Muslims throw stones and worse in order to prevent visitors, Jews, from entering the compound.

^

And now a P.P.S.:-

Palestinians, Israeli police clash at Jerusalem holy site  

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli riot police entered one of Jerusalem's most revered and politically sensitive religious compounds on Wednesday to disperse rock-throwing Palestinians opposed to any Jewish attempts to pray there. The confrontation erupted after Israeli police tried to escort some 20 visitors onto the plaza revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's walled Old City. Palestinian youths, who a Reuters photographer said had gathered inside al Aqsa mosque, ran outside and threw rocks at the group. Israeli police in riot gear pushed onto the plaza and used stun grenades to disperse the demonstrators, but did not enter al Aqsa itself.

BBC Criticized for Its Coverage; Lack of Balance

Did this actually happen?

MPs criticise BBC for 'false balance' in coverage of Arab conflict with Israel and Zionism

Select committee says corporation continues to give opinions and historical fact the same weight

The MPs called on the BBC to develop clear editorial guidelines for all commentators and presenters on the facts of the Arab conflict with Israel and Zionism.

Editors of the Radio 4 Today programme and other BBC news teams have been criticised by MPs for giving political opinions about the issue and fact the same weight of coverage.

Andrew Miller, chairman of the select committee, publishing a report on how the media communicates, said: "Given the high level of trust the public has in its coverage, it is disappointing that the BBC does not ensure all of its programmes and presenters reflect the actual state of fact
in its output. The Today programme and other BBC News teams continue to make mistakes in their coverage by giving opinions and fact the same weight.".

The report follows longstanding frustration by Jewish and pro-Israel non-Jewish groups, academics and historians about many BBC programmes appearing to apply "false balance" when they cover the Middle East. This, they have argued, has often resulted in inaccurate or misleading coverage.

No.  Of course not.

But this did:

MPs criticise BBC for 'false balance' in climate change coverage

Science and technology select committee says corporation continues to give opinions and scientific fact the same weight

The MPs called on the BBC to develop clear editorial guidelines for all commentators and presenters on the facts of climate change.

Editors of the Radio 4 Today programme and other BBC news teams have been criticised by MPs for giving political opinions about climate change and scientific fact the same weight of coverage.

Andrew Miller, chairman of the science and technology select committee, publishing a report on how the media communicates climate change science, said: "Given the high level of trust the public has in its coverage, it is disappointing that the BBC does not ensure all of its programmes and presenters reflect the actual state of climate science in its output. The Today programme and other BBC News teams continue to make mistakes in their coverage of climate science by giving opinions and scientific fact the same weight.".

The report follows longstanding frustration by environment groups, academics and scientists about many BBC programmes appearing to apply "false balance" when they cover climate change. This, they have argued, has often resulted in inaccurate or misleading scientific coverage.

^

The BBC Goes Not Nittel on Christmas

Here in England, I meet up with Judaism's ghost.

Ghost story, that should be:

Mark Gatiss’s dramatisation of The Tractate Middoth (BBC2) by...MR James. Don’t let the title put you off: this is a terrifying story of a haunting in a library. 

More:

Gatiss's adaptation of James's spine-tingling tale will air on BBC2 at 9:30pm on Christmas Day, followed at 10:05pm by MR James: Ghost Writer, a documentary about the revered master of discomfiture, which Gatiss will front...[Sacha] Dhawan, meanwhile, appears...[i]n The Tractate Middoth, he plays a young library assistant drawn into the supernatural world surrounding an obscure Hebrew text, 

A Talmudic text on Christmas?

The scenario is simple. A rich, diabolically misanthropic clergyman has surrounded himself with ancient books. He has a “soul like a corkscrew”. He has two possible heirs – one, John, he hates; the other, a harmless widow with a daughter, he despises. As he dies, he resorts to mortmain (“the hand of the dead”), the will that outlasts the body. His vast property he leaves, by one will, to his male heir. A later will leaves everything to the heiress. Yet he has secreted the revised will in an ancient and particularly sinister [???] book: The Tractate Middoth. He has donated this to a rare book library – but which one? And, if it is found (which, 20 years later, it is), what dark forces will theTractate release?Gatiss makes confident changes to his source text. He moves the main action from the Edwardian period to the 1950s. He introduces characters, a deathbed scene (which James might have thought a trifle heavy-handed) and Doctor Who-style visual effects. He makes the young hero a jaunty Cambridge undergraduate, not a beaten-down assistant librarian. It all works, although for those who love the story it jolts a bit.Two things combine to make the M R James story as perfect in its “movement” as a Swiss watch: brevity and a feather-light touch.

Just two comments.

1.  Tractate Middoth is not all that obscure or sinister. 

2.  On Christmas, there is a custom not to learn Torah.  And Christmas Eve is called 'Nittel' Nacht.  More here.

^

Problems With BBC Bias Already in ... 1947

From the Palestine Post, September 1, 1947:

And now for the BBC:

^

The BBC Does Tel Shiloh and Jewish Culure & Archaeology

The BBC includes Tel Shiloh, actually it highlights it, in their story on cultural heritage.

Excerpts (and comments):

Israel heritage plan exposes discord over West Bank history

Israel is launching a Year of National Heritage, to coincide with the country's independence day. As part of this push to celebrate heritage, Israel is progressing with a five-year project promoting Jewish ties to ancient sites in Israel and the West Bank. Israel says it is a purely cultural endeavour, which will help save sites from ruin; but Palestinians have criticised it as politically driven - highlighting deep historical differences fuelling the conflict.

(Note how the Pals. define the historical events of ... 1948: "The Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage (DACH) has been in existence now for more than 12 years since its re-establishment in August 1994. The inauguration of the DACH, under the Palestinian National Authority, was a momentous event and represents the revival of the Department of Antiquities established in 1920 under the British Mandate and terminated with the political events of 1948, when Israel was established."  Now, that is a very, ahem, non-political way to describe Arab rejection of the UN Partition recommendation and the launching of a war of extermination agauinst the Jewish state, six months before it was to come into existence, not to mention why that British Mandate existed - which was to facilitate the reconstitution of the Jewish national home, with immigration and close settlement in the area of, at least, Judea and Samaria)

On a peak in the archaeological park of Tel Shiloh, finishing touches are being put to a new multi-million dollar visitors' centre, due to open in a few weeks' time.  The rotunda overlooks a rectangular stone outline of what many believe to be the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, brought here by the Israelites who made Shiloh their capital. Excavations there will resume in the summer.

"Who knows what they'll find," says Ncoom Gilbar, a translator who has lived in the Jewish settlement of Shiloh, which contains the park, for 22 years. "It's a very exciting prospect."
 

(the latest finds: here; and also here; and here.  Those of 2007)

The ruins scattered around Tel Shiloh are testament to the recognition through the ages of its significance as a Biblical site - "it's a whole jumble of periods", says Mr Gilbar. Behind us, archaeologists and workers delicately excavate the ground around a 4th Century Byzantine church, dusting stones by hand and pushing wheelbarrows of rubble. Nearby stand the remains of an 8th Century mosque, built on top of another, earlier church.

In the past couple of years the number of tourists visiting Tel Shiloh has grown exponentially, a trend set to continue since the government designated the park a national heritage site last year.  This means Tel Shiloh, along with other ancient West Bank sites, will receive special government funding for their development and upkeep.

"Is there an attempt to bring more people here? Yes," says Mr Gilbar. "Is that wrong? No. This is where our history in the Land of Israel began."
 

(We're no strangers to controversy)

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the $190m National Heritage Sites project in 2010, he said Israel's existence depended "first and foremost" on educating future generations about Jewish culture and connection to the land. "A people must know its past to ensure its future," he said.

(My take; that of Dror Eydar)

"The West Bank is an integral part of the history of Palestine," says Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. "Netanyahu's heritage plan is an aggression against the cultural right of Palestinian people in their own state," as the West Bank's status is considered to be by many Palestinians.

Mr Taha says the Israeli government's emphasis on the Jewish historical aspect of some sites is "an ideological misuse of archaeological evidence".
"Jewish heritage in the West Bank - like Christian or Islamic - is part of Palestinian heritage and we reject categorically any ethnic division of culture."
 

(Taha said something else in Ocotber 2011: "The town of Shiloh is another target for Taha’s revisionism. Despite Shiloh being the capital of the Jewish nation for nearly four centuries and the Jews having brought the Tabernacle there, making Shiloh the religious center of the Israelites before Jerusalem, Taha is convincing the international community that the Jewish Shiloh never existed: “In Shiloh the settlers pretended to have found the tabernacles,” he proclaimed. “They can find the chicken bone my grandfather ate 50 years ago and say it was a young calf for ancient sacrifice.”)

..."If you want to learn about the history of this land, it's about the different layers, the different civilisations that have been here - it's not just about one," says Yoni Mizrachi, a former Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist...Mr Mizrachi, whose organisation Emek Shaveh opposes the "politicisation" of archaeology...

(If there is any politicisation being done, its is Mizrachi's work with Emek Shaveh.  And we've been minimized before).



Another well-rounded, comprehensive and factual report from the BBC.


P.S.  They could have included Tel Shiloh's web site, too.
^

The BBC As Palestinian Propaganda Instrument

If you review this audio/slide show story,  (Audio by Yolande Knell.Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 9 November 2012)

 Olive harvesting in the West Bank

The annual Palestinian olive harvest is an important cultural and economic event. Nearly half the agricultural land in the Palestinian territories is planted with eight million olive trees - and there are about 80,000 farmers, most of whom operate on a small-scale basis.  But many have difficulty accessing their olive groves, because they are located close to Jewish settlements or the barrier that Israel is building in and around the West Bank. Israeli soldiers are deployed in some areas during the harvests to try to prevent clashes with settlers...

You wouldn't know there is another side and that there are other facts and claims.

That: Jewish olive groves are destroyed and damaged.
That: not all the damage is the work of, as per suspicion, Jews.
That: not all the olive groves are owned by the people who claim to own them.
That: olive groves existed in the land, planted by Jews, over 2000 years ago and that some groves are occupied territory by Arabs.

Did you hear:
 

"Try to attack the families"?  

or perhaps Arabs are not acting in accordance with the new regulations that permits the IDF to provide security while also assuring there will be no Arab terror?  That olive groves have been used for cover for ambushes of shooting at Jews on the roads, or the trees used as cover for infiltration?

"Expanding into his village"?  

but no Jewish community actually move into an Arab village.

This would seem to be the narrator, Ms. Vivien Sansour, note: narration, no reporting:

Some of her biography:

Vivien Sansour is a life style writer and photographer. She is capturing the stories of the farmers of the Palestine Fair Trade Association for the wider world. Vivien was Communications Manager/Life and Culture Specialist at The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) prior to joining Canaan. Vivien is an activist and organizer...Vivien was co-founder and producer/writer for the Los Angeles based non- profit ImaginAction where she organized and led the wildly successful Olive Tree Circus to tour Palestine in 2008. The Olive Tree Circus used humor, play, music and art to help Palestinian farmers access their olive fields during the olive harvest. Vivien is a native of Beit Jala, Palestine where she grew up under Israeli military occupation. She has both a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Theatre Arts, and an M.A. in International Studies with a focus in Anthropology from East Carolina University. She is interested in Agriculture as a form of resistance.

Well, at least that "growing up under Israeli military occupation" didn't affect her ability to get an education and it didn't stultify her artistic talent..

The BBC just rolled over and thought of...Palestine.


This is not reportage or a journalistic effort.  It is propaganda, uncriticised, imbalanced, unchecked. 

^ 

A BBC Breakdown

How stupid can the BBC be?

You ask?

Well,  there's this story on its site:

A woman presenter has appeared on Egyptian state TV in an Islamic headscarf for what is believed to be first time since it opened in 1960. Fatima Nabil wore a cream-coloured headscarf as she read a news bulletin.  Under the regime of ex-President Hosni Mubarak there was an unofficial ban on women presenters covering their hair. But the new Muslim Brotherhood-led government has introduced new rules, saying that nearly 70% of Egyptian women wear the headscarf.

Fatima Nabil appeared in the headscarf to read the mid-day news bulletin on Sunday.  The presenter later told the BBC: "At last the revolution has reached state television."  She is expected to be followed by other news and weather presenters similarly dressed. 

While once could sympathize with the discriminatory ban on appearing with one's head covered, such a fashion is usually indicative of a more restrictive approach to women's rights and the fact that the

new Muslim Brotherhood-led government has introduced new rules, saying that nearly 70% of Egyptian women wear the headscarf.

means that modern-looking women will be oppressed and their rights squashed.

So, what headline did the BBC give to this story?

Egypt's veiled presenter in 

breakthrough TV appearance


"Breakthrough"?

Breakdown, truly, of liberal humanist values..

^

"Rare" BBC Report

The BBC is not anything if not even-handed and completely objective (okay, stop smiling).

Today's web site headline example:

Two killed in Gaza border clash

An Israeli soldier and a Palestinian have been killed during an exchange of fire along the Gaza border.

An 'exchange' is such a neutered term.

If you read further, the story goes like this:

The Israeli army said that the Palestinian cut through the border fence and opened fire on Israeli troops, who then shot back..There are reports that there was heavy mist in the area making it easier to approach the fence undetected early on Friday..It is not uncommon for the Israeli army to open fire on Palestinians who approach the fence. But it is rare for a Palestinian to break through and for an Israeli soldier to be killed in such an exchange, the BBC's Jon Donnison reports.

Well, it may be rare but multiple rocket/missile firings from Gaza aimed exclusively at civilians, not soldiers, are much more common.

And so, no guilt, no responsibility, no who initiated.

P.S.

AR wrote to me:

By contrast, Maan, the Palestinian news agency, with no need to play the BBC's shabby we-take-no-sides games, calls this morning's terrorist infiltration an "attack". See here

And I found this there:

Palestinian sources in the Gaza Strip told Ma'an that the attack appeared to have been aimed at luring Israeli forces into the area in an attempt to capture a soldier.

^

BBC's Censorship of the Concentration Camps

Is media bias relatively new?

No.

Here's a case from 1945:-

...far away to the east, BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby — father of David and Jonathan — was reporting from the liberated concentration camp Belsen on the living skeletons he encountered there. He saw corpses with their liver and kidneys cut out by their Nazi captors, evidence of cannibalism, and men and women thrown still alive into the crematorium. His editors didn’t believe him and refused to broadcast it.


Not until a furious Dimbleby threatened to resign did they agree to transmit a toned down version. As the British began to organise the burial of the stinking corpses — among them that of 15-year-old diarist Anne Frank — soldiers hurried to bring rations to the starving survivors...

Was it a Jewish problem for the BBC?

^

Bravo to BBC

BBC opened its report thus:

At least eight Palestinian children have been killed in a collision between a school bus and an Israeli truck on a road in the West Bank, police say.

But, even though at the very end (and maybe his editor did that), he did note

The truck driver was also hurt in the crash although the full extent of his condition is unknown. Our correspondent says although the truck had an Israeli licence plate, it did not necessarily mean the driver was Israeli.

I immediately was upset that there was an implication that the driver was Jewish when there is at least a 50-50 chance that he was Arab.

I wonder how the other outlets dealt with this.

_______________

WashPost:

The truck driver was said to be an Arab Israeli citizen who may have lost control in heavy rains and slick roads.

JPost:

The truck driver, an Israeli Arab, is being treated at hospital and is due to be questioned by police.

^

What They Think About the BBC

Nigel Fardale:-

...the BBC. They had a Left-wing bias [in the good old days] and they made no apology for it. Now they have become almost pathological in their desire to avoid making any value judgments whatsoever. As James Clappison MP asked on Wednesday: “It makes you wonder what you have to do for the BBC to call you an extremist.”...

...would it have cost the BBC so much integrity to have called those who killed 52 civilians on London transport “terrorists”? A BBC memo at the time of 7/7 said they had to be called “bombers” instead — “terrorist” was a “loaded term”. Too right it was loaded, with 22lb of hydrogen peroxide, a 9-volt detonator and a copy of the Koran. It went without saying, they couldn’t be called Islamic extremists either. Islamic radicals, maybe. Or Islamic conservatives. But not Islamic extremists. That might have implied a value judgment.

^

BBC Bans Call of "Free Palestine"

Challah Hu Akbar alerted me this story that the BBC has censored a British rapper who, in this clip, at 3:00, shouts "I can scream 'Free Palestine'" - but he can't. The sound of broken glass replaces it.

From the lyrics:

I still have the same beliefs
I can scream free Palestine die for my pride still pray for peace
Still burn the feds for the brutality they've spread over the world
Pakistan's an ocean, bodies in the brown water floating still nobody helps

But some 3 seconds later, he shouts "Pakistan".

British hypocrits.

^

Does the BBC Filter Through Arab Propaganda?

The BBC reports:

Israeli soldiers have broken up a demonstration by hundreds of villagers and peace protesters outside the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, a week after a protester died at a similar event.

The video there, at 49 seconds, claims no stones were thrown. The correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, gets so agitated I thought he was in danger of over-exciting himself.

Wafa claims

Upon arrival of protesters near the fence, where they were able to remove some of the barbed wire, soldiers behind the concrete wall shot stun grenades and tear gas toward the participants, which caused suffocation to dozens.

some of the participants threw stones at the soldiers, who continued to fire tear gas at them.

Who am I - and you - to believe?

No violence and the IDF started it or - Arab propaganda filtered throught the BBC?

P.S. At around 2:25, you can see how not-smart the IDF is. The wind is blowing in the wrong direction but they are still shooting tear gas - which is just blowing back at the soldiers. Can a dumb tactic like this be the norm in an army that is supposed to have killed, on purpose, a demonstrator last week?


^

Hitchens Jewish? Don't Ask the BBC

The BBC obit on Christopher Hitchens leaves out this biographical information:

Hitchens had a complicated and evolving relationship with Israel and Judaism.

Regarding Israel, he allied himself in the 1970s and 1980s with Palestinian nationalists and called himself an anti-Zionist.

As an atheist, he engaged with Judaism as he did with other faiths -- with disdain for what he saw as a corrupting, malign irrationalism. Yet in later years it was his inclination against religion that seemed to moderate his views on Israel.  He developed a grudging appreciation for a democracy in a region he saw burgeoning with radical theocrats.

He also detected among some of his fellow Israel critics a tendency toward anti-Semitism, as much as saying it was an element driving the thesis of overweening pro-Israel influence in "The Israel Lobby," the 2007 book by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

"Mearsheimer and Walt belong to that vapid school that essentially wishes that the war with jihadism had never started," he wrote in 2006 of the essay that was the basis for the book. "Their wish is father to the thought that there must be some way, short of a fight, to get around this confrontation. Wishfulness has led them to seriously mischaracterize the origins of the problem and to produce an article that is redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being slightly but unmistakably smelly."

Hitchens was 38 when his maternal grandmother revealed to his younger brother Peter that she was Jewish.

He told The Observer in 2002 that the revelation "thrilled" him -- living in Washington, he had acquired a passel of Jewish friends. Moreover, he had had a dream of being on the deck of a ship and being asked to join a minyan.  Despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish.

Hitchens' proclivity, his insistence on pleasing no one but himself, was evident this summer when his target was a small group of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip on the anniversary of the Israeli raid on another flotilla that claimed the lives of nine Turks and earned Israel international opprobrium.

He could not resist tweaking Israel for a tendency to blunder into confrontation.

"Since Israel adopts a posture that almost guarantees a reaction of some sort in the not-too-distant future, and since there was such a frisson of violence the last time the little fleet set sail, there's no reason for it not to become a regular seasonal favorite," he wrote in Slate.

But then he went on to note the activists ties or sympathies with the Hamas-led government in Gaza, also noting Hamas' embrace of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

^