BBC: A Case Study in Bias
The BBC demonstrated exactly what is wrong with its coverage of Israel. In its headline Hamas fighter killed in Israel air strikes on Gaza, could the BBC have found a more sanitised way to describe a terrorist bomb maker and senior Hamas leader?
But it gets worse - the BBC does not just underplay the effects of rockets from Gaza, but fails to even mention that this particular attack employed the more powerful and longer-range Grad missile:
Rocket fire from Gaza has reduced in the past year after Hamas reined in attacks, but sporadic fire from other militant groups continues.
Correspondents say such attacks are almost always ineffective, with rockets mostly landing in open fields.
Who are these nameless "correspondents" that the BBC relies on make a judgement on just what constitutes an effective rocket attack? Even when such rockets have failed to hit a target, the act of firing them at Israeli civilians forced to take cover in shelters, disrupting everyday life, is terrifying enough irrespective of casualty figures.
In fact, approximately 110 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israeli territory since the beginning of 2010, and over 400 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead.
All of these rockets are fired with the express intention to kill and maim Israeli civilians - something that the BBC seems incapable or unwilling to acknowledge. As such, the BBC turns a blind eye to the reality and distorts the truth.
And just to make the point that the BBC is more concerned with a seeming imbalance in the casualty figures, its report states:
One Thai farmer in Israel has been killed in the past year.
Dozens of Palestinians, some of them civilians, have been killed in attacks from Israel over the same period.
Using a simplistic description lacking in any context, the BBC succeeds in ensuring that Israel comes across as an aggressor by downplaying Palestinian rocket attacks, removing their murderous intent and portraying Israel as the killer of Palestinians. Thus Israeli self-defence is given the same moral equivalence as the terrorist acts emanating from Gaza.
The BBC has, once again, demonstrated its insidious form of anti-Israel bias.
Isn't it about time the BBC made the effort to report what is really happening?
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