Category: Israel

BBC’s Mark Thompson Soft on Israel?

In 2005 the Independent reported speculation in the Israeli press that BBC director general Mark Thompson intended to build bridges with the Israeli political class.  This could help to explain Thompsons position on aid to Gaza, after all, they’ve broadcast appeals for victims of other conflicts without worry about impartiality.  Could Marks personal interest be what makes this one special?

BBC chief defends Gaza decision (11:59) | MP3

The BBC is often accused of an anti-Israeli bias in its coverage of the Middle East, and recently censured reporter Barbara Plett for saying she “started to cry” when Yasser Arafat left Palestine shortly before his death.

Fascinating, then, to learn that its director general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hardine Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country’s political class.

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This cowardly decision betrays the values the corporation stands for

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn takes his former employer to task over its disgraceful acquiescence in Israeli efforts to withhold relief from Gaza’s long-suffering population.

On Tuesday, speaking from a pulpit in Westminster Abbey, the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, paid tribute to one of the corporation’s greatest journalists and broadcasters, Charles Wheeler, who died last summer at the age of 85.

Thompson spoke in reverential terms of Wheeler: his independence; his dislike of authority, any authority; his relentless search for the truth, in postwar Germany, in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, LBJ, Vietnam, Nixon; in India, Kuwait, Kurdistan. Thompson was right. Wheeler was a giant among BBC journalists, rightly hailed as one of the best of his generation.

But even as Thompson spoke, the corporation was traducing every tradition that Wheeler, and many of us who still work for the BBC, have tried to live by. The corporation’s chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, had refused to allow it to broadcast an appeal on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee for Gaza. She said that one reason was that “the BBC’s impartiality was in danger of being damaged”. Could the BBC be sure, she added, that money raised for this cause would find its way to the right people?

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Winning and Losing in Gaza

Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in the Occupied Territories, in The Nation:

Now that there is a cease-fire in Gaza, questions are emerging about what Israel has achieved. Of course, the lopsided casualty figures and Israel’s military dominance certainly make it the battlefield winner. But such a “mission accomplished” assessment is as misleading in occupied Palestine as it was in Iraq. Although Hamas could not come close to matching Israel’s armed might, it may have won a major battle for Palestinian hearts and minds. Reports from the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian diaspora suggest widespread anger at the Palestinian Authority for its passivity and a rise in support for Hamas, even among secular Palestinians, in appreciation of its determined resistance to the brutality of the Israeli occupation and military operations. If Hamas becomes the dominant political force in all of occupied Palestine when the next elections are held, Israel will be the loser.

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Europe to Join Blockade of Gaza

According to AFP “France, Britain and Germany have offered to help prevent arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip.”  Why don’t they offer to help get aid into Gaza?  Seeing as Israel has been ramming aid shipments in international waters, a grave act of lawlessness and piracy to quote Chomsky:

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Gaza in Ruins

Gaza in Ruins: A news special from Al Jazeera.

The Gaza Strip is a land in ruins, devastated by 22 days of war.  In this news special from Gaza, Al Jazeera focuses on the damage from the war – the human, physical and political damage suffered by people here, people already weakened by an 18-month siege at the hands of Israel.

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Come on Down For Your Freedom Medals

John Pilger puts forward his nominations for Bush freedom medals.

On 13 January, George W. Bush presented “presidential freedom medals,” said to be America’s highest recognition of devotion to freedom and peace. Among the recipients were Tony Blair, the epic liar who, with Bush, bears responsibility for the physical, social and cultural destruction of an entire nation; John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia and minor American vassal who led the most openly racist government in his country’s modern era; and Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, whose government, according the latest study of that murderous state, is “responsible for than 90 per cent of all cases of torture”.

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Utter failure for Israel

Gideon Levy opines that the Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel.

On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel.

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Unseen Gaza

When Jon Snow went to report on the massacre in Gaza, he was barred from entering the conflict zone, along with other Western journalists.  The following is a documentary film of his experiences.

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The BBC refuses to broadcast Gaza charity appeal

The indispensable Media Lens has an important Rapid Response Media Alert. The BBC has already used your license fees to feed you foreign state propaganda, now it also wants you to be complicit in Israeli crimes. Don’t hesitate to register your protest.

Numerous members of the public have written to us expressing their bewilderment at the violence of Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza killing upwards of 1,300 people and wounding 4,200. To many witnessing the onslaught on their TV screens (especially Al Jazeera) this appeared to be an act of state sadism.

Israeli forces repeatedly bombed schools (including UN schools), medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, UN buildings, power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes.

On January 15, Helpdoctors.org reported that Al Quds hospital had been “again the target of bombing”. Some 50 patients, 30 in wheelchairs, fled as the burning hospital was “totally destroyed”.

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Alarm Spreads Over Use of Lethal New Weapons

As more news of the brutality of the Israeli invasion comes to light, medical personnel based in Gaza speak of unprecedented suffering inflicted upon the civilian population. Aside from “clear and undeniable” evidence of the use of white phosphorus, according to Amnesty International, Israel is now accused of deploying so-called Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) and other, hitherto unseen, lethal and indiscriminatory weapons of mass destruction.

Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realised it was gone – completely severed by the weapon that hit her.

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