More BBC Dross 253


“You have had to live with the missile threat from Gaza for fourteen years now. But now you face a new threat, the tunnels Hamas have built running here from Gaza. How concerned are you about that?”

Incredibly, that really was a question asked by BBC journalist Stephanie Bell of an Israeli man, just broadcast on BBC1. So far over 600 Palestinian civilians have died compared to two Israeli civilians (one of whom was a Bedouin who as a matter of policy are denied air raid shelters). Yet the BBC continues to pump out the narrative that the “problem” is Hamas attacks on Israel.

There are many other more interesting questions Stephanie Bell might have asked. Here are some:

“Do you ever wonder about the lives of the Arab families who lived here before they were removed by force? Whether any of them are now living in Gaza and under those bombs and shells”

“Do you honestly believe that this land is yours because God said so?”

The BBC had also been reporting as credible Israel’s appalling denials that it massacred those families in the UN school, and completely unsubstantiated claim it was stray Hamas fire that did it. The UN have confirmed that Israel has regularly been hitting UN schools and medical facilities.


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253 thoughts on “More BBC Dross

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  • Ba'al Zevul (With Gaza)

    Look for 5000 Gazans dead. Assuming they don’t kill any more of the invaders. Somewhere in Tel Aviv, there’s an accountant, for whom no fate is sufficiently painful, dictating this atrocity.

  • oddie

    i also just heard an interview with Lerner on BBC world service. beeb guy said re a possible ceasefire & the tunnels (paraphrasing) clearly you are a long way for being able to agree a ceasefire. how the british public continue to pay the licence fee is beyond me.

    btw

    Armed robbery in Gaza – Israel, US, UK carve up the spoils of Palestine’s stolen gas
    Nafeez Ahmed
    http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2489992/armed_robbery_in_gaza_israel_us_uk_carve_up_the_spoils_of_palestines_stolen_gas.html

  • Ba'al Zevul (With Gaza)

    Your cut-out-‘n-keep guide to how to shill for murdering bastards:

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/israelgaza-conflict-the-secret-report-that-helps-israelis-to-hide-facts-9630765.html

    The study admits that the Israeli government does not really want a two-state solution, but says this should be masked because 78 per cent of Americans do. Hopes for the economic betterment of Palestinians should be emphasised.

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted with approval for saying that it is “time for someone to ask Hamas: what exactly are YOU doing to bring prosperity to your people”. The hypocrisy of this beggars belief: it is the seven-year-old Israeli economic siege that has reduced the Gaza to poverty and misery.

    On every occasion, the presentation of events by Israeli spokesmen is geared to giving Americans and Europeans the impression that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians and is prepared to compromise to achieve this, when all the evidence is that it does not. Though it was not intended as such, few more revealing studies have been written about modern Israel in times of war and peace.

  • Mary

    This David Manning Summerhead.

    Handle with care. Asbestos gloves needed. Hot stuff.

    Monday, 21 April 2014
    PRINCE WILLIAM, SIR DAVID MANNING AND THE COMMITTEE OF 300 http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/prince-william-sir-david-manning-and.html

    I remember him accompanying the Kate/Will.I.Am duo on their trip to N America and Canada in 2011.

    ‘Sir David Manning, a former foreign policy aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair and Britain’s ambassador to America for four years, will also tag along, coaching the couple on charity work, official functions and more.’
    http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/prince-william-kate-middleton-north-american-trip-guide/story?id=13948180

  • Mary

    Back and up and running. Well not quite yet but I have substituted the vertical for the horizontal position. My operation and recovery were mixed up with the terrible images and sounds of a cruel war coming from the various screens I saw on my travels within hospital and then a nursing home. The poor poor Palestinians and their little ones with the fear and hurt showing in their beautiful eyes. Where I have been very fortunate to encounter healing and loving care, the Palestinians have met with death and pain from terrible wounds and their homes are rubble. I cannot believe that it is still happening three weeks since the start and that governments seem to be silent.

    ‘YouGov Survey Results
    Sample Size: 1658 GB Adults
    Fieldwork: 27th – 28th July 2014

    For each of the following, please say whether or not you think
    they are guilty of war crimes?

    The current Israeli government
    Is guilty 62%

    http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/ejq2q2g7ym/Internal_Results_140728_War_Crimes_W.pdf

    No child should be harmed.

  • Mary

    Shooting and Crying Over Lost Moral Army
    by Jonathan Cook / July 29th, 2014

    I really wonder what it says about the Guardian
    or its readers that it publishes an article like this one by Yuli Novak, a former Israeli air force officer. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/28/israeli-military-most-moral-no-more-outrage-indifference
    The discourse, even on the left, is still so degraded on the issue of Israel-Palestine that this seems to pass for progressive thought.

    I am also appalled that I almost find myself pleased that this former soldier, an insider, is telling us that Israel is acting immorally in its current attack on Gaza. But in doing so she bolsters a patently ridiculous mythology that, for most of its history, Israel had a moral army – the most moral in the world, no less – and that only a decade ago the army agonised over every Palestinian death.

    As someone who lived and reported through those years, at the start of the second intifada, I can say with certainty that that is utter nonsense. This was a time when the Israeli chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, the current defence minister, spoke of “searing” defeat into the Palestinian consciousness.

    Let’s not forget that the Israeli army, far from once being driven by moral ideals, began life with an act of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in 1948. It has been maintaining and expanding the cleansed zone ever since.

    What’s so dangerous about these “shooting and crying” articles – I remember an equally silly one a few years back in the Observer by Will Hutton about the “once noble ideal” of the kibbutzim, the racially pure communities Israel built over the ruins of Palestine – is that they lay claim to a golden era, one that, of course, never existed, when Israel’s mission was truly wholesome.

    Writers like Novak want Israel to return to an imaginary recent past, ignoring the fact that the present is simply a logical extension of everything that went before. The seeds of the current rampage in Gaza were laid in the decades of Israel’s dispossession of the native population, culminating in the Nakba of 1948. Most of the population of Gaza are refugees from that period – their grievances and rights unaddressed all these many years later.

    It is some consolation that people like Novak are waking up to the ugliness of Israel’s national mission: to subdue and displace the native Palestinian people. This is evidence of the self-destructive course Israel is set on. But Novak’s moral high ground is undermined entirely if she wants to claim it was all much prettier a few years ago.

    http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/07/shooting-and-crying-over-lost-moral-army/

  • Mary

    Praise be for Lord Wright of Richmond, ex Ambassador to Arab countries, for standing up for the Palestinians in Gaza in the House of Lords yesterday. The equivalent of the AIPAC lobby were a’whingeing and a’whining in full flow.

    Lord Wright of Richmond (CB): My Lords, while fully associating myself with the Minister’s condemnation of anti-Semitism in all its forms, does he nevertheless accept that much anti-Semitism is a reaction to the appalling Israeli treatment of its Arab neighbours in Gaza, Jerusalem and on the West Bank?

    Noble Lords: No!

    Lord Wright of Richmond: Is not the best action that the Government can take to avert such activity to show not only that they deplore such actions as the constant growth of Israeli settlements and the disproportionate reaction of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza but that they are prepared, with our European allies, to take effective steps to stop them?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Wright,_Baron_Wright_of_Richmond

    Antisemitism
    2.58pm
    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldhansrd/text/140729-0001.htm#14072930000253

    The mover of the question was Lord Leigh of Hurley. His register:

    http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/lords/lord-leigh-of-hurley/4295

    10: Non-financial interests (c)
    Trustee, Jerusalem Foundation

    10: Non-financial interests (d)
    Member, Executive Board, Conservative Friends of Israel

    10: Non-financial interests (e)
    President, Westminster Synagogue
    Vice President, Jewish Leadership Council
    Chairman, Jewish Care Business Group

  • Mary

    Harry Fear is bravely reporting from Gaza. Most of the international press have left.

    This morning’s report on the shelling of the UN school and a visit to the el Shifa hospital.

    20 killed in Israeli shelling of UN school
    Published time: July 30, 2014 04:20
    http://rt.com/news/176576-gaza-un-school-strike/

    Dr Nafiz Abu Shaban is overwrought understandably.

    Harry’s report of yesterday’s date

    Gaza Ceasefire Fiasco: 100 Palestinians and 5 IDF soldiers reportedly killed in overnight bloodbath
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaiN18hS3d8&feature=youtu.be

  • Ba'al Zevul (With Gaza)

    Why is the US so in love with Israel?

    It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.

    Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them. Perhaps it can’t. It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it. Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends. Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others. Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole. The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel’s behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.

    Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts. But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform. All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf. Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.

    Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study. Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan. Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.

    …much more here:

    http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/israel-asset-or-liability/

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