THE vile massacre in Israel last weekend has not just brought some of the nastiest people on the planet out of the woodwork, it has also revealed the startling number of those for whom 2 plus 2 very quickly equals 5, people who are quick to the draw and ready to put their critical facilities to one side. The 5 in this case being that Israel perpetrated this gruesome and attack on their own people, because how else would you account for Israel being caught on the hop, so to speak? Many other ways of course. More on that rabbit hole in days to come, but worth in the meantime reading Mark Steyn’s take on what may be the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history. It is here.
But what I really want to look at today are the consequences of the refusal by the BBC (and other media outlets) to ‘call anyone on the left a “terrorist” . . . even Hamas baby-killers’, as David Keighley commented in the Express on Saturday. And yes, it was terrorists not militants that did kill babies. If that is not ‘terror’ I do not know what is. That is a fact, whatever the reasons which either ‘allowed’ or ‘failed to stop’ the massacre.
But it was not a fact to the BBC, as David points out:
‘When veteran BBC Middle East Correspondent Jeremy Bowen wrote this week about the horrendous massacre in the Kfar Aza kibbutz – in which whole families, including babies, were mercilessly slain using gut-wrenching methods – the headline on the BBC website was simply “Inside Kfar Aza where Hamas militants killed families in their homes” (my emphasis). There was only one mention of terrorism – not as a description of the event but a quote from a soldier interviewed by Mr Bowen, who said there were “terrorists everywhere” when the attack was launched. All week, since the Hamas slaughter was unleashed, the BBC has been pig-headedly maintaining that the word is not being used by the Corporation itself to describe the massacre of at least 1,000 Israelis by Hamas because – in the words of John Simpson, its World Affairs Correspondent – it would mean the BBC was taking sides and not being objective in its reporting, and would breach editorial guidelines on impartiality.’
David goes on to describe the whole phalanx of BBC luminaries such as Radio 4 Today presenters Mishal Husain and Nick Robinson up on their high horses reinforcing this ‘impartiality’ point. You can read his full report here.
But of course it is not about impartiality, this is moral relativism in the guise of impartiality – a clever ploy not just to avoid telling the truth but to justify an institutional bias disguised as ‘fairness’. It is unutterably and dishonestly specious.
What is particularly irresponsible is the ‘permission’ such lying has given and continues to give to the morally depraved celebration of barbarism we witnessed on our streets all this last week. Quite as frightening as Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts of the 1930s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Union_of_Fascists
Take but two examples.
Here the National Education Union leader’s uninhibited murderous chant:
And here pro-Palestinian protesters wearing paraglider pictures, the reason for which you can see here:
Please note – they are not denying Hamas responsibility for the massacre, they are celebrating it. For more reporting on their warped thinking and depraved behaviour, see Mark Steyn’s round-up of the week here.
Such downplayed reporting of the attack on Israel of course was not the sole prerogative of the BBC and Sky News; nor indeed were the consequent shameful demonstrations of racial hatred across the nations’s streets or the failure of our ‘hate crime’ police to quell them despite the threats to a minority group that media ‘condoning’ disinhibits, the UK’s alone. Australia, led by its BBC equivalent, ABC, was quite as bad.
On Saturday the brilliant and free-thinking Rowan Dean, editor of the (so much better) Australian edition of the Spectator on Sky News Australia lacerated his country’s state broadcaster over its ‘disgusting’ reporting following the attack, observing that ‘indifference has reached a point where some Western media outlets and commentators continue to label mass terrorists as militants’. And who was quoted? No, not a traitor to the conspiracy cause (as some of us have been labelled) but Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Palestinian writer.
Please watch Dean’s broadcast here.
Readers, please tell me, was there an equivalent take-down on any British channel?
