BBC takes sides – but which side?
BBC journalists struggle for an inoffensive headline on their website.
BBC implies Palestinian dead are Israeli
Amena Saleem, Electronic Intifada
October 20, 2015
A fresh Israeli onslaught against Palestinians began at the start of October, resulting in almost 50 Palestinians killed in just under three weeks.
Nearly ten Israelis were slain during that same period.
While extreme and sustained Israeli violence against Palestinians is a routine feature of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, just as predictable is the BBC’s coverage of it.
And so it comes as no surprise to witness the BBC focusing almost exclusively on Palestinian attacks on Israelis while presenting Israel, not only as the victim, but the sole victim of October’s violence — while mentioning Palestinian fatalities only in passing.
John Humphrys, Today presenter. His apparent aggressive stance towards Palestinians (when they get on air at all) compared to his emollient tone towards Israeli spokespersons infuriates many; but no doubt he enjoys that.
A prime example this week was a segment on the BBC’s flagship radio news programme Today. On 19 October it broadcast a four-minute chat between veteran presenter John Humphrys and one of its Middle East correspondents, Kevin Connolly.
With 42 Palestinians killed at that time, and thousands more injured in attacks by settlers and soldiers, Humphrys began his conversation with Connolly like this: “Yet another attack on Israelis last night. This time an Arab man with a gun and a knife killed a soldier and wounded 10 people. Our Middle East correspondent is Kevin Connolly. The number is mounting, isn’t it Kevin? The number is about 50 now, isn’t it?”
Not only does Humphrys’ introduction make it sound as though only Israelis are being attacked, he quite extraordinarily implies that the 50 who had been killed since the beginning of the month were all Israelis.
Connolly doesn’t correct him. He instead adds: “We think around 50 dead over the course of the last month or so, John. This sudden sharp uptick of violence; not just that attack at the bus station in Beersheva, inside Israel itself, but also, on Saturday, a wave of stabbing attacks in Hebron and in Jerusalem.”
Concern for the occupier
The Middle East correspondent corroborates the presenter’s estimate of “around 50 dead” but fails to mention that all but eight of them were Palestinian, including young children, and allows the idea that all the victims are Israeli to remain floating in listeners’ minds.
He then backs this up by talking about the “uptick of violence” with his subsequent references to attacks on Israelis in Beersheva, Hebron and Jerusalem.
The two continue in the same vein for four minutes, only ever referring to Palestinians as attackers of Israelis, never as victims of Israeli violence.
Midway through, Connolly launches into an emotive description of Israeli fear of Palestinians.
The “very random and spontaneous nature of the attacks,” he says, “has left many Israeli citizens feeling that any Palestinian passing them in the street might be carrying a knife, might be planning to attack them. Any passing car might at any moment be used as a vehicle against Israeli civilian pedestrians.”
Palestinians in the West Bank suffered more than 130 settler attacks in the first week of October alone and, in Gaza, have endured more than 700 Israeli attacks since a ceasefire was signed on 26 August last year. But they are unlikely to ever have their fears of armed settlers and soldiers described with such understanding by Connolly.
Connolly’s concern is for the occupiers, not the occupied. That there have been any Palestinian fatalities at all is only given a passing mention in the very last sentence of this two-way conversation. Connolly tells Humphrys that “individuals are taking the decisions to stage these attacks for reasons we’re often left to guess at because, of course, the attackers often die in the course of the attack.”
Palestinian deaths ignored
The Palestinians, then, are “attackers” only, and they just happen to “die in the course of the attack.”
The reality, which Connolly does not want to go into, is that Palestinians are being gunned down by Israeli soldiers and settlers. And not just “in the course of the attack.”
Connolly chooses to ignore the growing video evidence which shows that several of the Palestinians shot dead or wounded by Israeli soldiers over the last three weeks have not posed any danger, despite Israeli claims to the contrary.
He chooses to ignore condemnation of these killings by human rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem.
He chooses not to criticize Israel for shooting dead suspected attackers rather than arresting them and putting them through a proper trial.
And he chooses to ignore the fact that the toddler Rahaf Hassan and her pregnant mother, Nour, were not attacking anyone when Israel hit Gaza with an airstrike on 11 October, killing them both. Or that 14 of the Palestinians killed in October were shot dead in Gaza.
And he chooses to pretend that we cannot possibly know why Palestinians are so frustrated that some of them are attacking Israelis — Israelis who occupy their land, who demolish their homes, who raid their refugee camps at night and drag their children, terrified, from their beds and into detention.
Israel as victim
For the BBC’s audiences, Palestinians must be presented only as attackers: attackers who deserve what they get, and their violence must be presented as random and inexplicable to the rational observer.
The choices made by Connolly and Humphrys in this odd conversation, which was neither a news item nor an interview, but felt more like a little interlude for Israeli propaganda on Today, are mirrored elsewhere in the BBC’s reporting.
A BBC Online article, insultingly headlined “Is Palestinian-Israeli violence being driven by social media?“ purports to provide “some key questions and answers about what is going on.”
The BBC’s answer to “what is going on” is, of course, given entirely from the Israeli perspective of Israel as victim, Palestinians as crazed attackers.
The first question asked is: “What is happening between Israelis and Palestinians?”
Echoing Humphrys’ introduction on Today, the BBC article begins: “There has been a spate of stabbings and gun attacks on Israelis by Palestinians since early October, and one apparent revenge stabbing by an Israeli.”
It adds: “Israel has tightened security and clashed with rioting Palestinians, leading to deaths on the Palestinian side. There has also been associated violence in the border area inside the Gaza Strip.”
Again, what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians is not the occupation, as far as the BBC is concerned, but Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
In fact, the BBC does everything it can to take responsibility for what is happening away from the occupation and Israel. According to the BBC’s coverage, Israel does not actively attack Palestinians. It merely “tightens security,” and this happens to “lead to Palestinian deaths.”
Specific numbers, which would make it shockingly clear that Palestinian fatalities far outnumber those on the Israeli side, are not given. The killing of 14 Palestinians in Gaza is reduced to “associated violence.”
“Israelis hurt”
This concern for the occupier is highlighted in the article with a graph titled “Stabbing attacks on Israelis by Palestinians.” The graph uses statistics dating back to December 2014.
There is no graph showing Israeli settler and soldier attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank during the same period.
If there was, it would show countless attacks and 47 fatalities – 19 Palestinians in the West Bank killed between January and August 2015 – a figure which would shoot up if fatalities in Gaza were included.
But the BBC does not like to bring its audience’s attention to the pain Israel inflicts on the people it holds under occupation.
On the morning of 10 October, Marwan Barbakh, 10 years old, and Khalil Othman, 18, were shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Their slayings were not covered anywhere on the BBC.
Instead, the BBC Online headline for the day was: “Jerusalem attacks: Israelis hurt in two Palestinian stabbings.”
That evening the Palestine Solidarity Campaign highlighted this extraordinary omission on its social media sites, particularly Facebook, and asked people to send complaints to the BBC.
An hour later, the BBC changed the headline to “Israeli-Palestinian violence continues” and began the article with news of the killing of the two Palestinians in Gaza. It could not bring itself to humanize the youths, however, by providing their names, and the rest of the article continued with details of stabbing attacks on Israelis.
Similarly, when the toddler Rahaf, and her mother Nour, were killed in their Gaza home, the BBC did not name them when it mentioned their deaths in an online article, nor did it report on the grief of their family as it might have done had they had been Israeli.
The horror of their killing was not reflected in the headline and it merited only two sentences in an article which, again, focused on detailing Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
It is disgraceful that a news organization which has a commitment to impartiality written into its charter chooses to show such open concern for Israelis under attack while, at the same time, displaying a near disdain for the killing of occupied Palestinians.
Yes, the BBC’s Israel-centred reporting and the way it rallies behind the occupier at times like this is predictable, but its reports are watched, heard and read worldwide, and the global dissemination of this shocking bias should concern us all.
“An Israeli soldier shoots and kills a Palestinian holding a knife after he stabbed another Israeli soldier, seen kneeling, during clashes in Hebron, West Bank, on October 16, 2015. The Palestinian man, wearing a yellow “press” vest and a T-shirt identifying him as journalist, stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier before being shot dead by troops, the latest in a monthlong spate of attacks.” The Atlantic. Knife attacks by lone Palestinians are new and so make the news.
Why the BBC is biased against Israel
A grossly erroneous report on last week’s Jerusalem attack seems to corroborate claims about the broadcaster’s deep-seated anti-Israel bias. It doesn’t: The real reason for the mistake is much more alarming, and it has nothing to do with Israel.
By Gilad Halpern, Ynet Op-ed
October 06, 2015
It’s happened. The BBC, the pinnacle of quality journalism, joined a string of world-renowned news networks to have grossly misreported a terror attack against Israelis. “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two” read the headline on Saturday, failing to convey that the casualty was a terrorist who perpetrated a deadly stabbing and shooting attack, rather than an innocent victim.
The BBC headline is a new and unwelcome addition to what seems more like a trend than a series of isolated incidents. In November last year, a shooting spree at a Jerusalem synagogue was reported by CNN as having taken place at a mosque, and only weeks beforehand, the Associated Press led a report on a vehicular attack against Israelis with the headline “Israeli police shoot man in East Jerusalem.” Put together, these reports ostensibly reveal a fundamental anti-Israel bias: To Western journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, violence is one directional, emanating by definition from the Israeli side and directed against the Palestinians.
Last summer, in the immediate aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, Israeli-Canadian journalist Matti Friedman published a lengthy indictment of his former employer, the Associated Press, that drew on a similar argument. Friedman, who served as Jerusalem correspondent for the reputed news agency until 2011, outlined in his Tablet magazine article the various reasons why the international media is clearly, yet in most cases unwittingly, biased against Israel.*
For many Israelis and Israel’s sympathizers in the world, Friedman was barging into an open door. His suitably titled “Insider’s guide to the most important story on earth” served as a whistleblower of sorts, corroborating long-held convictions with a first-hand account. However, contrary to the reasons often evoked for this bias – from double standard to plain anti-Semitism – Friedman’s nuanced analysis demonstrated how the disproportionate attention given to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians puts it under exacting scrutiny from which it’s very unlikely to come out unscathed.
In truth, the shortcomings decried by Friedman – that have been repeatedly confirmed since – betray something much more worrisome than anti-Israel bias. More than latent anti-Semites, the journalists who wrote these shoddy headlines were simply ignorant. They failed to grasp the very rudimentary elements of the story, and exhibited a shocking unawareness of the general context – namely, the “most important story on earth.”
This should set the alarm bells ringing for the network executives, whether in London, Atlanta or New York. The last competitive edge that remains for big news organizations, amid a seemingly endless flow of information that the Internet provides, is their ability to separate the chaff from the wheat and tell a story that is coherent and truthful. And in these cases, they demonstrated none of that.
How can professional journalists, working for renowned publications read by millions worldwide, make such embarrassing mistakes, time after time? The answer lies in a structural failure that is a direct result of the crisis that has gripped the media industry for more than a decade, and is likely to deepen even further.
The media industry has seen its traditional business model all but collapse. Once an immensely lucrative business, media outlets have been forced to cut back on costs, resulting in running skeletal operations that are based on cheaper – and therefore younger and inexperienced staff. With a 24-hour news cycle where immediacy is the name of the game, they are expected to work faster, higher, stronger – for less.
What we see is the proliferation of a custom known as “churnalism,” a portmanteau term that refers to journalists being required to produce sizable copy against increasingly tighter deadlines. To date, it has been the mainstay chiefly of local newspapers and freebies and minor-league publications, which relied on a small, multitasking staff that was bent on filling the paper’s pages. Quite regularly, press releases were copied verbatim and presented as original articles. Actual journalism – such as reporting based on sources, fact checking, etc. – were put on the backburner.
What we see here is the result “Churnalism” gradually penetrating the big, established news organizations. Positions such as special correspondents or specialized editors were abolished and replaced by a generalist news desk, consisting of editors, in many cases junior, who are now required to tackle a gamut of fields and beats. They, not the Jerusalem bureau chief, were charged with releasing the first breaking news report from Jerusalem – and the result reflects that.
The culture of dilettantism that has become the face of 21st century journalism is detrimental to the profession itself much more than Israel’s image, or any other cause that it seems to be biased against.
* International press coverage is a morality play about the familiar villain
PM Netanyahu and photographers visit Adele Banita in hospital. The headline for this story in The Blaze was “Israeli Stabbing Survivor Details How Palestinian Bystanders Stood by and Laughed While Her Husband Bled to Death”. Photo by Kobi Gideon/Israeli GPO
Editorial, JPost
October 06, 2015
Foreign news purveyors tend to sanitize terrorist crimes against Jews – when they bother to report them. They also dehumanize Jewish victims when referring to them by generic designations with distinct derogatory nuances.
The heartrending tragedy of Adele Banita offers a stark case in point.
She, her husband, and two babies were attacked by a knife-wielding Arab terrorist on Jerusalem’s main Old City route to and from the Western Wall. Aharon Banita was stabbed to death and one toddler was slashed. Adele escaped the murderer’s grasp – and with his blade still stuck in her neck – ran to raise the alarm, to save her children.
It was the stuff of nightmares, of sadistic horror flicks.
The Arab merchants all around her not only failed to help, but they mocked and sneered at the profusely bleeding young woman. They spat on her. They slapped her. They jeeringly wished death upon her.
This was every bit as hideous as the Holocaust-era Ukrainians, who – if they didn’t murder with their own hands – excitedly cheered the murderers on. Not only did the homicidal assailant not regard Adele as a human being, but neither did the bystanders who unequivocally supported him.
This incident underscores the essence of Israel’s struggle.
We face bloodthirsty enemies who blatantly deny our right to be anywhere in this country, not only in Jerusalem, but Tel Aviv. They aren’t out merely to “protect al-Aksa Mosque from defilement by filthy Jewish feet” (in the words of PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas) – they also aim to prevent Jews from praying at the Western Wall.
Indeed, any Jewish presence is per se anathema to them.
Adele’s youngsters would have been slaughtered had help not arrived in time. Indeed death would have been the fate of the four children who witnessed the brutal drive-by execution near Itamar of their parents – Naama and Eitam Henkin – had the terrorists not inadvertently shot one of their own.
But was any of this viciousness and ghastliness conveyed to news consumers abroad? Quite the reverse occurred.
The BBC website headline announced: “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack kills two.”
The BBC didn’t note that the murderer was shot in the midst of his killing spree. The BBC left it unclear who killed whom and who the “killed two” (mentioned in the passive voice) were. After repeated complaints, the phrasing was changed three times – yet in all the truth remained obfuscated.
Significantly, the BBC never apologized.
Its conduct was worse than al-Jazeera’s, whose re-cap was only slightly less misleading: “Palestinian shot dead after fatal stabbing in Jerusalem; 2 Israeli victims also killed.”
Clearly we expect less of the Qatar-based network than of the London one. Yet, unlike the BBC, al-Jazeera apologized and revised the headline to read, “Two Israelis killed in stabbing attack; Palestinian suspect shot dead.”
These weren’t the only offenders by a long shot.
The Washington Post’s follow-up reports aroused dismay by omitting the context in which events unfolded. As tensions grew, the tenor of the foreign media was of an Israeli- initiated escalation, divorced from any background.
Israel came out looking bad.
When the media overseas at all bothered to note who the victims were, they were mostly described as “settlers.”
Presumably that categorized them as somehow culpable.
A broad-spectrum sense of something undesirable adheres to “settlers” that makes shedding their blood semi-understandable, even if this is only tacitly hinted at.
This tactic is used regardless where victims reside. It’s an all-purpose castigation. It was even applied last year to the four elderly congregants axed to death during morning services in a west Jerusalem synagogue, well within Israel proper. It’s a non-specific unspoken insinuation of illegitimacy against all Jews in Israel.
Just as the identities of the four were never dwelled upon, so Adele’s story wasn’t told. But callous dehumanization is only the beginning. It gets lots worse when reports are skewed to the extent that a casual glance at the headline suggests Israeli wrongdoing.
Likewise suggested is that the attacker is the victim and that there is no connection between him and his actual victims. Such outrageous word-manipulations cannot be dismissed as unintentional.