The Guardian's front page declared: "the descent into violence in
the Middle East accelerated last night" in a "dramatic escalation".
(Rory McCarthy, 'Eight dead as gunman hits Jerusalem religious school',
The Guardian, March 7, 2008). A Daily Mirror headline read: 'Kids
Murdered In The Library' (Allison Martin, March 7, 2008). The Telegraph
asserted that the attack "is likely to be remembered as the moment the
Middle East peace process died." (Tim Butcher, 'Hopes of peace in the
Middle East are blown away in a hail of bullets', Daily Telegraph,
March 7, 2008)
The contrast to reactions to the killing of over
120 Palestinians, including many women and children, in occupied Gaza
the previous week could hardly be more striking. On one day alone, 60
people died in a hail of Israeli firepower using F-16 planes, Apache
helicopter gunships, tanks, armoured bulldozers and ground troops.
No
Western leader was heard condemning the Israeli assault on Gaza as "an
attempt to strike a blow at the very heart of the peace process." To
our knowledge, no reporter suggested that "the peace process" had now
"died". No headlines screamed of Palestinian babies "murdered" in their
beds. In short, news reports from the Gazan bloodbath typically lacked
the anguished details and tone that suffused the reporting from
Jerusalem less than a week later.
Nor was there the same
heightened pitch and intensity of news coverage following Israel's
deadly 'incursion' into Gaza in mid-January. 17 Palestinians were
killed in one day, and around 50 injured, while President Bush was
visiting the region. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said:
- "What happened today is a massacre, a slaughter against the Palestinian people.
But
for the Western media the massacres that really matter, the ones which
"strike a blow at the very heart of the peace process", are those
inflicted on Israelis.
The BBC's Propaganda Role
The
humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now at its worst since the occupation by
Israel began in 1967. More Gazans are dependent on food aid than ever
before: fully 1.1 million out of a population of 1.5 million. Hospitals
are suffering the longest power cuts yet experienced, record levels of
raw sewage are being pumped into the sea, and the economy is at its
most dire with unemployment set to exceed 50 per cent. ('
The Gaza
Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion', March 6, 2008; ). Is it any wonder
that the people of Gaza are in despair?
Our alert of March 3
highlighted the lack of attention given to the latest assessment by
John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories.
Palestinian terrorism, while abhorrent, is the "inevitable consequence"
of Israeli occupation, noted Dugard. He warned: "the collective
punishment of Gaza by Israel is expressly prohibited by international
humanitarian law." (Media Lens media alert, '
Israel's Illegal Assault
On The Gaza "Prison"', )
The BBC's official response to our challenge about its neglect of Dugard's vital analysis was telling:
"We
missed the original publication of John Dugard's report, but are
intending to write about its formal presentation to the UN later today.
- "It is fair
to point out however that Mr Dugard's views are not those of the UN.
Under international law, an occupied community is not allowed to adopt
terrorist methods against the civilian population of its occupier.
Occupied people remain under an obligation to conduct themselves
according to the laws of war. So, while terrorism may be an 'inevitable
consequence' of the occupation, that does not mean it is somehow
legitimate. The UN, including the secretary general and the security
council, have repeatedly condemned suicide bombings and rocket fire
from Gaza: " (Email
from "The BBC News website" [no name provided], March 6, 2008)
This
response is noteworthy, even for the BBC's usual shameful record. There
was no mention of Israel's responsibilities as the occupying power, or
its repeated and brutal transgressions of international and
humanitarian law over forty years. Human rights groups, such as Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem in Israel, have
documented many grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention,
constituting war crimes. Little of this fundamental context ever makes
it into BBC news reports.
Instead, the BBC focused exclusively
in its reply on the obligations of "an occupied community" which has
been continually attacked and impoverished by an Israeli state that is
massively supported - financially, militarily, diplomatically - by
Washington. The anonymous BBC official who wrote that "while terrorism
may be an 'inevitable consequence' of the occupation, that does not
mean it is somehow legitimate" was answering a strawman argument of his
or her own invention. Neither Media Lens nor the UN Special Rapporteur
claimed that Palestinian terrorism was "legitimate." Indeed, had the
BBC employee read the report, he/she would have seen that Dugard had
condemned Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel's civilians as "war
crimes".
As promised, the BBC news website did indeed write
about the Dugard report; it devoted all of 168 words at the bottom of a
short news item. The item noted blandly that unspecified "scheduling
problems" meant that the report would now be presented to the UN in
June rather than this month. (BBC Online, '
UN alarm at Gaza-Israel
violence', March 6, 2008; ). For the
Special Rapporteur's assessment to be shunted to one side by the
'international community', even as the slaughter in the Middle East
continued, was horribly ironic. The possibility that power politics
might have been at play in the alleged "scheduling problems" appears to
have eluded the media's scrutiny.
The Eternal BBC Claim: "We Will Not Be Cheerleaders For Anybody"
Jeremy
Bowen, the BBC's Middle East news editor, received numerous emails that
were copied to us. Many were in direct response to our alert, but
others were sent spontaneously by people appalled at the coverage they
were seeing and hearing from the publicly-funded broadcaster. After the
killings at the Jewish seminary, Bowen defended the corporation's
recent unbalanced news coverage from the region:
- "In the last
week, we have reported very fully from inside Gaza as well as from
Sderot and Ashkelon. We will continue to report on the Palestinians in
Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But we will also report fully
from the Israeli side. The BBC's reporting will be as impartial as we
can make it. We will not be cheerleaders for anybody." (Email, March 6,
2008)
Bowen's assertion simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
In our March 3 alert, we cited the testimony of former BBC Middle East
correspondent Tim Llewellyn who pointed out that 'balance' is "the
BBC's crudely applied device for avoiding trouble". This inevitably
leads to a clear news bias towards the viewpoint of power residing in
Israel, Washington and London.
The public can see for
themselves the 'neutral' media language used to describe Israeli
actions: 'incursion', 'retaliation', 'military operations'. By
contrast, Israel endures 'terrorist attacks', 'slaughter', 'a
bloodbath'. Careful analysis by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, of the
Glasgow University Media Group, found a persistent, ugly pattern:
"In
our samples of news content, words such as 'mass murder', 'savage
cold-blooded killing' and 'lynching' were used by journalists to
describe Israeli deaths but not those of Palestinians/Arabs. The word
'terrorist' was used to describe Palestinians, but when an Israeli
group was reported as trying to bomb a Palestinian school, they were
referred to as 'extremists' or 'vigilantes'." (Philo and Berry, 'Bad
News From Israel', Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 259)
The
reality is that by devoting disproportionate coverage to Israeli deaths
over Palestinian deaths, the BBC's claims to "impartial" reporting are
simply demolished. With great consistency, lives in the 'Third World'
are presented as being of far less importance than those who are 'like
us'. At its most brutal, we see a deeply racist attitude that also
underpins the culture of killing in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Major
General Bargewell's report into the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in
Haditha by U.S. marines gave a glimpse of the prevailing mindset:
- "Iraqi
civilian lives are not as important as US lives, their deaths are just
the cost of doing business..." (Josh White, 'Report On Haditha Condemns
Marines; Signs of Misconduct Were Ignored, U.S. General Says,'
Washington Post, April 21, 2007)
And while the BBC and other
news media continue to pump out propaganda about the Middle East, the
"cost of doing business" is only too obvious to the victims and anyone
who cares about them.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of
Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for
others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to
maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to: Jeremy Bowen, BBC's Middle East news editor
Email: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk
Write to Helen Boaden, BBC news director
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk
Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org
Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us:
Email: editor@medialens.org
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Media Lens book 'Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media' by
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Writings 
The horrific shooting of eight young people at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem last Thursday was followed by saturation media coverage. International statesmen lined up with condemnations of the attack and condolences for the victims and their families.
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I live in Oregon, USA and I found that the media was saturated with the same news coverage that day also. Even though about 69 Iraqis were killed and about twice as many injured in an explosion that same day! Goodness knows how many others died in Darfur, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Uganda, or Haiti to name a few of the places currently at war. In addition, let's not forget the ones who die daily from cancer, HIV/AIDS, the common cold and flu and other diseases that can be cured with the $12 billion USD that are practically being laundered through companies like Halliburton, Black Water and General Electric. It is a shame and I am tired of how white and wealthy life seems more valued than that of folks like me and my loved ones.
Thank you so much for writing about this. I am fed up with white supremacy wherever it exist and I have suffered at the hands of white Jewropeans whom I feel are not the original Jews. They have stolen the land of our ancestors everywhere. Hitler did not just kill whites who called themselves Jews but also Catholics, homosexuals, blacks and mixed raced north Africans as well as aramenians or so-called Gypsies.
Best regards.