Another Misleading Headline on a Palestinian Terror Story, From the BBC

How the BBC initially reported the November 5 terror attack in Jerusalem. Photo: Screenshot

The uninitiated reader spying the BBC’s initial headline about this morning’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem – “Driver hits pedestrians in Jerusalem” – could have been forgiving for thinking that this was a report of a traffic accident in Israel’s capital.

The accompanying tease – “A driver rams a car into several pedestrians in East Jerusalem” – communicated the sense that most of the victims were Palestinians, since this part of the city is predominantly Arab.

Then, the headline was changed to the more accurate “Jerusalem attack: New Palestinian car attack kills one,” prompting media watchdog Honest Reporting to ask, “Is the BBC asking to be ridiculed? Draw your own conclusions.”

The latest headline on the story reads “Jerusalem attack: Netanyahu blames incitement.” No explicit mention is made of the death in the attack of a police officer, Capt. Jidan Assad, 38,  from the Druze village of Beit Jaan.

Media analysts have consistently pointed to a trend of inaccurate and misleading headlines concerning Palestinian terrorist attacks upon Israelis from a range of media outlets. On October 23, for example, the Associated Press reported the murder of of a three month-old baby, U.S. citizen Chaya Zissel Braun, in another Jerusalem attack with the headline, “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem.”

“The BBC and several other news organizations appear to be going out of their way to avoid a headline that clearly names the perpetrator and victims of today’s terror attack,” Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst with media monitor CAMERA, told The Algemeiner in an email. “The current BBC headline,‘Jerusalem attack: Netanyahu blames incitement,’ is perhaps better than the one used by Voice of America, ‘Car Hits Crowd of Pedestrians in Jerusalem,’ which seems to describe a routine traffic accident. But neither is particularly clear about what happened.”

Ini praised the Associated Press for getting it right this time. “The Associated Press, which failed so terribly with its headline two weeks ago, this time shows how to pithily convey the key details of the story: ‘Palestinian kills Israeli in Jerusalem car attack,’” he said.

BBC's anti-Israel bias

The British Broadcasting Corporation could never be accused of showering Israel with sympathy. Indeed the BBC could never be credited with gracing Israel with the rudiments of objectivity. Nonetheless, the BBC has managed to flabbergast even those Israelis who hadn’t expected minimal fairness from it.

The BBC has devoted a web page to the Olympics participating nations. Most of the entries are straightforward enough, but not so the ones devoted to Israel and “Palestine,” which, though not a sovereign state, did win recognition as a member of the Olympic Council of Asia since 1986 and the International Olympic Committee since 1995.

On the latter’s country profile page, the BBC listed “East Jerusalem” as the capital of Palestine. No capital whatever was noted on the page devoted to Israel, not even “West Jerusalem.” As expected, that generated considerable commotion and even a written complaint from government spokesman Mark Regev.

Discomfited, the BBC tried a quick fix, defining Jerusalem as Israel’s “seat of government,” but not without failing to add that “most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.”

The corresponding revamp on the Palestine page seeks to strike equivalence with the following: “Intended seat of government: East Jerusalem. Ramallah serves as administrative capital.”

Evincing no hint of regret, the BBC later waxed indignant and argued that the modifications on its website were “generated by online lobby activity.” The inference is that there was something untoward in said “online lobby activity” and that the BBC had its arm unjustly twisted.

Moreover, no opportunity appears to have been missed to render Israel’s image disagreeable. The photo chosen to represent Israel on its BBC profile shows an IDF soldier screaming at an Arab, with the caption reading: “Israelis and Palestinians have been at loggerheads for decades.”

The Syrian page, in contrast, looks idyllic. It pictures three pretty little girls in white Muslim garb with older black-clad women in the background, all smiling. The caption informs us innocuously that “the overwhelming majority of Syrians are Muslim.”

Concomitantly, the campaign to commemorate the 11 Israeli athletes slain by Arab terrorists at the Munich Olympics exactly 40 years ago received zero coverage on the BBC. That’s starkly different from the choices made by other international news providers, British ones notably among them.

The BBC’s palpable anti-Israel predispositions are nothing new. Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial adviser, compiled a report in 2004 on the BBC’s radio and television broadcasters’ attitudes toward the Israeli-Arab conflict. The 20,000-word Balen Report is said to contain scathing criticism of the BBC, which fought tooth and nail against demands that it release it under the Freedom of Information Act.

But despite Balen’s admonitions, the BBC remained unrepentant and failed to clean up its act. A most telling case in point was its coverage of the March 2011 Itamar massacre, where Palestinian terrorists invaded the home of the Fogel family and butchered the father, mother, their two young sons and three-month-old baby daughter.

The BBC’s version abounded in outright inaccuracies and mind-boggling omissions. Worst of all, it was given scant resonance altogether. It was unmentioned on BBC Television and was accorded only a fleeting brief reference on radio.

In his testimony to Parliament earlier this month, the BBC’s outgoing director-general, Mark Thompson, belatedly acknowledged that his organization “got it wrong.”

Yet as this latest controversy surrounding the BBC’s misrepresentations indicates, the BBC willfully keeps right on getting it wrong. It doesn’t exert much effort to get it right.

Last summer, for instance, it featured a story claiming that a Jerusalem court sentenced a dog to death by stoning. This was an utter hoax, which a preliminary check would have revealed. Yet apparently the goodwill didn’t exist to accord Israel fair treatment. The temptation to paint Israel in the most unflattering colors plainly couldn’t be resisted. The fabrication in this case was so blatant that the BBC eventually removed this item but not before it blackened Israel’s face.

Yet more than such shenanigans damage Israel, they undermine the BBC’s own integrity. For its own good, it ought to desist from so flagrantly exposing its bias.

Disgusting BBC piece sympathizing with a child-killer terrorist

The BBC's idea of a hero:

A two-bed flat not far from the cornice in Qatar's capital, Doha, is now home for 47-year-old Ibrahim Shammasina from Ramallah.

His new living room is twice as large as the cell in the Israeli jail where he spent 19 years.

"A minute of freedom is worth more than all the possessions in the world," says Shammasina. "Prison, it's a grave - as if you're in a grave but still alive."

Shammasina was sentenced to 23 years in jail for his role in the 1990 murder of three Israelis and a further 20 years for planning a kidnapping. Despite spending almost half his life in prison, he does not regret his actions.

"When there is an occupation, you're forced to," he says. "It's your duty, the duty of every Palestinian, to resist the occupation. If I didn't resist, I would just have surrendered."

Out of one of the bedrooms steps Ibrahim's frail 85-year-old mother, Tamam. While he was in prison, Ibrahim's brother, father and wife all died.

His mother, who peppers every sentence by giving thanks to God, could not see her son foryears.

Understandably, she has now decided to come to Qatar to be with him.

Despite the time they spent apart, she supports what he did.
"No, I don't regret it. I don't regret it," she says simply.

Also visiting Shammasina for a few weeks is one of his two sons, 24-year-old Iyad.

His father has been in prison for most of his life, but he says that he does not feel any anger towards him, although they do not have a typical relationship.

"He's more my friend than my dad," says Iyad.

The BBC allows Shammasina to talk about how horrible prison is, how wonderful freedom is, and how important resistance is. It describes how heartbroken his mother is, how he is trying to rebuild his family, and how tragic it is that his brother, father and wife all died while he was imprisoned. The entire is designed to make the reader sympathize with him and with the tribulations he has had to endure.

But it doesn't say a word about his victims.

Who did Shammasina kill?

Lior Tubul and Ronen Karmani, were both seventeen years old (some reports say Ronen was 18.) On a summer day in 1990, they went to visit their girlfriends north of Jerusalem.

Shammasina abducted them, bound their hands behind their backs, gagged them and then stabbed themdozens of times, so that their faces were unrecognizable. They were dumped in a ravine nearby.

This subhuman scum was also involved in murdering a taxi driver, Rafi Doron, as well as abducting and killing a hitchhiking soldier, Yehoshua Friedberg.

This happened during that non-violent first intifada we hear so much about.

This is the monster - and child-killer - that the BBC is asking its readers to sympathize with.

BBC Ethics Unveiled: Lies About Jerusalem, Lies About Guidelines

A family slaughtered in Israel – doesn't the BBC care? The corporation's coverage of murder in Israel reflects apparent bias against the state

Who is Tamar Fogel? The chances are that you will have no idea. She is a 12-year-old girl who arrived home late on Friday, March 11, to discover her family had been slaughtered. Her parents had been stabbed to death; the throat of her 11-year-old brother, Yoav, had been slit. Her four-year-old brother, Elad, whose throat had also been cut, was still alive, with a faint pulse, but medics were unable to save him. Tamar's sister, Hadas, three months old, had also been killed. Her head had been sawn off.

There were two other Fogel brothers sleeping in an adjacent room. When woken by their big sister trying to get into a locked house, Roi, aged six, let her in. After Tamar discovered the bodies, her screaming alerted their neighbour who rushed in to help and described finding two-year-old Yishai desperately shaking his parents' blood-soaked corpses, trying to wake them up.

I found out about the barbaric attack not on BBC news, but via Twitter on Monday. I followed a link there to a piece by Mark Steyn entitled "Dead Jews is no news'. Horrified, I went to the BBC website to find out more. There I discovered only two stories: one a cursory description of the incident in Itamar, a West Bank settlement, and another focusing on Israel's decision to build more settlements, which mentioned the killings in passing.

As the mother of three children, one the same age as little Elad, who had lain bleeding to death, I was stunned at the BBC's seeming lack of care. All the most heart-wrenching details were omitted. The second story, suggesting that the construction announcement was an act of antagonism following the massacre, also omitted key facts and failed to mention the subsequent celebrations in Gaza, and the statement by a Hamas spokesman that "five dead Israelis is not enough to punish anybody".

There were more details elsewhere on the net: the pain and hurt, for example, of the British Jewish community at the BBC's apparent indifference to the fate of the Fogels. The more I read, the more the BBC's broadcast silence amazed me. What if a settler had entered a Palestinian home and sawn off a baby's head? Might we have heard about it then? On Twitter, I attacked the UK media in general, and the BBC in particular. I considered filing a complaint.

The next morning, the BBC's public affairs team emailed me a response that amounted to a shrug. The story "featured prominently on our website", they said. It was important to report on the settlements to put the murder in context, they said. In reply, I asked a series of questions: for how long did the massacre feature on TV news bulletins? On radio? On BBC News 24, with all that rolling airtime? Why were the Hamas reaction and Gaza celebrations not featured? And what about the omission of all the worst details?

It was only when I tweeted about their continued indifference that the BBC replied. Then they informed me that the Fogel story had not featured on television at all. Not even News 24. It was on Radio Four in the morning, but pulled from subsequent broadcasts. The coverage of Japan and Libya, they said, drowned it out. Would I like to make a complaint?

Do you know, I think I would. The BBC has long been accused of anti-Israeli bias. It even commissioned the Balen report into bias in its Middle Eastern coverage, and then went to court to prevent its findings being publicised. As a member of the select committee on culture, media and sport, I was at the confirmation hearing of Lord Patten of Barnes as chairman of the BBC Trust. I asked him about political neutrality. In reply, he said that he would give up his membership of a Palestinian aid organisation. Both I and another member asked about bias against Israel. Lord Patten denied any existed. What would he do if shown an example of it? He would ultimately take it to the BBC Trust, he said.

The day after Lord Patten uttered those words, the Fogel children were butchered to almost complete silence from the BBC.

I have asked the corporation to let me know why, if the story was "prominent on the website", it was not deemed of sufficient merit to broadcast on television, and barely on radio. I have asked them to explain the inaccuracies and omissions in the reporting. And I have asked them what non-Japan, non-Libya stories made it to air, in preference. Twenty-four hours later, I have yet to receive a reply.

Like many of us, I consider the BBC to be a national treasure. I am not a BBC basher; I have never before complained. I do not support nor do I condone the Israeli settlement building. But none of that matters. This is a story about three children and their parents, slain with incredible cruelty, and its effect on the peace process. As a mother, I am shocked at the silence. As a politician, I am dismayed at the apparent bias and indifference. Yes, I will be filing a complaint – about a story I never heard. I hope Daily Telegraph readers will join me.

BBC's reaction to the Fogel family massacre

The BBC also referred to the terrorist as an intruder in its report. "The family - including three children - were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Israeli media reported," the BBC reported Saturday. Readers might deduce the family members died in a failed burglary attempt.

The BBC was worse than that. Much, much worse.

The BBC, however, virtually buried the Fogel family’s massacre, once again demonstrating its obsession with the settlement issue above all other issues relating to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

No dedicated reportage of the brutal attack was featured elsewhere on the site. Instead, subsumed in a story of settlements, it warrants only a few lines. The BBC does, however, report that the attack “has shocked many Palestinians”. Of course, the BBC failed to mention that Hamas described the attack as a “heroic operation” while sweets and candies were handed out in Gaza in celebration.

The BBC has exercised its own moral judgment that says that the issuing of building permits in settlements is the cause of terror. Otherwise, the story may have included statements from Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahuattributing the terror attack to Palestinian incitement.

The BBC has a well-staffed bureau in Jerusalem with the same access as other media outlets. Yet it chose not to publish any photos or specific details of the terror incident.

In the BBC’s world, it is all about the settlements. By politicizing such a heinous terrorist crime perpetrated against a baby, two small children and their parents, the BBC is as guilty as the perpetrators of dehumanizing innocent Israelis based on where they live. For the BBC, it seems that the location of the murders and the stress on how settlements “are held to be illegal under international law” is more important than the murders themselves.

If the BBC ever had any moral compass, it has demonstrated that it has completely lost it. In the BBC’s eyes, there is no moral difference between deliberately murdering innocent babies and the construction of homes in disputed territory. Indeed, for the BBC, the settlement issue at best allows one to “understand” why such an atrocity could take place and at worst, justifies it.

Read the whole thing.

By the way, this post also reports that CNN has removed the quotation marks it had placed around the term terrorist attack in its headline, but has not responded to any of the other demands made by the Government Press Office.

If Israel is demanding an apology from CNN, the BBC ought to be declared persona non grata and expelled from the country. Why is the Government Press Office silent on the BBC?