First, the one about delivery - the British government is giving £25m to Gazan relief, we don't have a problem getting it in. There's no reason why there should be any problem getting the relief in.
"Secondly, this nervousness about being biased. I'm afraid the BBC has to stand up to the Israeli authorities occasionally."
Asked by Jonathan Dimbleby, the chair of "Any Questions?", whether he was saying that Israeli pressure was behind the BBC decision not to broadcast the appeal, he said he didn't think it was, but went on to make these statements which clearly show that he does believe the BBC has made its decision because:
"Israel has a long reputation of bullying the BBC... The BBC has been cowed by this persistent and relentless pressure, and they should stand up to it."
So here we have a UK government minister claiming Israeli bullying has systematically cowed the BBC, and that it is so successful in doing so that it almost never stands up to it. Does he offer any evidence? No, he does not. Does the UK government support what its minister says -- effectively that the Jewish state exerts some degree of control over the main UK news organization?
On the other hand, there's no shortage of evidence from analyses of BBC and other media coverage of the Gaza conflict of a great deal of anti-Israel bias by key correspondents and news reports.
Via Harry's Place, there's evidence that there is now a concerted campaign, developed in relation to the Gaza conflict at a very recent conference under Hezbollah auspices in Beirut, that the Iranian proxies, with Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, to include campaigns around "humanitarian relief" as ways of promoting their long term war against Western-style democracies. Central to the conference was building alliances with radical western hard left groups under the common banner of support for "resistance". The SWP-Radical Islamist controlled Stop the War Coalition. And here from the current issue of SWP propaganda sheet "Socialist Worker" are the key messages:
Palestine has become a unifying force across the globe. That was the main sentiment of a conference against imperialism that took place in Lebanon last weekend.
The meeting brought together activists from the Middle East and the rest of the world, including Britain’s Stop the War Coalition and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste in France.
The conference was dominated by messages of defiance in the face of Israel’s assault from the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance movements.
Osama Hamdan, the representative of Hamas in Lebanon, told delegates that the Palestinian resistance inside Gaza would “continue to confront Israeli troops”.
Hamdan said that “our fighters have managed to halt the Israeli offensive, and would continue to battle until the troops withdraw”.
He called on the Arab regimes to back the resistance and European governments to cut all links to Israel.
“We do not trust Mahmoud Abbas,” he said in reference to the Palestinian Authority leader. “He does not represent the Palestinians.”
In a message to the global movement, Hamdan said, “The resistance will survive because all the free people of the world support us.
“Our fighters are drawing hope from the solidarity they are seeing across the world.”
The conference debated the practical measures to help the Palestinians’ struggle.
“Humanitarian appeals are now part of our political struggle,” one delegate told the conference
All the UK media have been reporting a large scale protest about the Gaza appeal refusal outside BBC headquarters in central London. But as can be clearly seen from the clip above, none of the reports have made clear that this was no spontaneous protest by would-be charitable humanitarians. For a start, it's obvious that almost all the banners concerned are the standard issue of the current SWP/Stop the War campaign-- Stop Gaza, Free Palestine. If you have the patience to watch the whole clip, you'll hear the repeated orchestrated chants, which soon switch from "Shame on the BBC" for "From the Jordan to the sea, Palestine will be free" and the other standard slogans which make it quite clear that this is a campaign for the destruction of Israel, not the relief of Gazans. You can hear a commentator asking protesters why they are taking part. The overwhelming majority state that they're there because they want to see the "whole of Palestine' freed from occupation--meaning all the land which is the state of Israel, not just territory under Israeli control since 1967.
In the BBC's case, is this somehow the result of being cowed by the bullying of the Israeli government? Will Ben Bradshaw explain exactly what evidence he has of his claims about Israel having this effect on the BBC? And why are none of the media carrying his accusation?
“'Humanitarian appeals are now part of our political struggle,' one delegate told the conference"
Only now? It's been the bread-and-butter of such Hamas run "charities" as the Holy Land Fund and the construction companies operated by Hamas and Hezbollah for a long time.
Posted by: Lynne T | January 27, 2009 at 05:25 PM