Embedded Deception in the BBC’s Coverage of Israel’s Onslaught!

• Embedded deception in the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s onslaught! 
  by Emile Badarin, http://mondoweiss.net/ 
  In the Middle East, people used to say “the BBC says” to adduce truth to their claims. Those days are now gone. For the majority of people in the Middle East, the BBC is now seen as parroting the official Israeli narrative in their conflict with the Palestinians.
  –
  The BBC’s reporting style, the structure of the story, terminological choice and contextual omissions are the main elements of deception in its coverage of the relentless Israeli onslaught on the Palestinians.
  –
  Dissatisfaction with the BBC’s reporting resurfaces whenever Israel wages a war on the Palestinians, Gaza in particular. Discontented people allude to the BBC’s “one-sided” coverage in favor of Israel. The BBC asserts that this discontent is unjustified because it has ‘reported on these issues [present attack on Gaza] in a fair and impartial manner’.
  –
  As a response to its critics, the BBC listed the following: “BBC News has reported extensively on Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza” (not attack, emphasis added), “detailed the series of airstrikes on Gaza”, reported on “civilian deaths and casualties”, “reported on the context of the conflict in light of Israel’s continuing blockade”, and “detailed the considerable differences between Hamas and Israel’s respective military capabilities”. It includes hyperlinks to specific articles: 1, 2 and 3.
  –
  The above list is true. Neither the quantity nor the content of the reported material is in question here. Rather, it is the style with which the BBC reports on Israel-Palestine. This style strikes a chord with Israel’s ready-made public relations dictionary.
  –
  The most striking feature of the BBC’s style is the authority with which it near always depicts the Palestinians as the instigators of violence to which Israel reacts in self-defense. Indeed that is how Israeli spokespersons package the events for public consumption, an unsurprising colonial representation. However, it is eerie to find the BBC conducting itself in the same fashion, while claiming impartiality.
  –
  It is extremely unusual for the story to begin with notes on Palestinian suffering. Even then, the BBC hardly considers Palestinian suffering as a cause for violence and self-defense, let alone as resistance to Israeli settler-colonialism. Instead, Palestinian violence is always characterized as illegitimate, because unlike the Israelis they should only negotiate and never use arms. Implicitly this creates the impression that Israel is always defending itself, and the Palestinians attacking.
  –
  On 15 May, Israeli snipers callously killed  two Palestinian teenagers in the West Bank town of Beitunia, 17-year Nadim Nuwara and 16-year Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, while they were commemorating al-Nakba (the catastrophe) Day. This incident did not make the BBC until several days later (20 May) and only after the footage spread over social and other media sources. Even then it was mentioned only in passing and with great reluctance, the viral nature of the story forcing the BBC to accept what it otherwise would not consider newsworthy.
  –
  Thus for the BBC the story about the recent Gaza conflict begins on 12 June 2014 when three Israeli teenagers were murdered near Hebron in Area C, which is under Israeli full control. Their names are not mentioned only because I assume that the amount of times they were mentioned in the media made them much more memorable than the hundreds of Palestinian kids killed in the last month, whose names are not allowed to be mentioned on Israeli radio and whose biographies do not receive front page coverage in the West. All are tragedies.
  –
  By devoting lavish coverage to these teens, the BBC contributed significantly to Israeli public relations and its media campaign casting their deaths as a national tragedy, which Israel then used to justify a severe crackdown on the Palestinians, first in the West Bank and then Gaza.
  –
  The BBC embraced the cynical and deceitful Israeli narrative of what had happened to the three young people. According to the German ZDF TV investigation, the Israeli government already knew that they were murdered straightaway, yet decided to capitalize on the tragic incident politically by inflicting violence on the Palestinians, first in Hebron, Jerusalem and then Gaza. Even though those murders were portrayed as an act planned by Hamas’ political leaders in Gaza, it is now widely acknowledged that this was a false misrepresentation used to build a pretext for war.
  –
  read more!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kureFeGmoDI]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O3eaXCxRUM]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVmiAR5nvJE]