Melanie Phillips’s Diary - http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary

Posted By Melanie Phillips On June 15, 2007 @ 7:24 pm In Diary |

True to its ever-more astounding and sickening form, (including this grovelling apology for calling Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, its capital) the BBC has been blaming the carnage in Gaza upon…Israel. According to its ineffable Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, the barbarism meted out by the Palestinians of Gaza upon each other is All Israel’s Fault:

The institutions, and the hopes behind them, have already taken a severe battering from Israel’s military actions over the last seven years and, more recently, by the punishing financial sanctions imposed by Israel and other countries after Hamas won a free election at the beginning of last year… What has happened also shows the failure of the decision of the world’s big powers to isolate Hamas. The financial sanctions they imposed, which caused severe hardship and helped fuel the violence in Gaza by making people even more desperate, were designed to either force Hamas to recognise Israel or to push it out of power. The policy has achieved neither objective.

No mention that aid to Gaza has at the very least doubled since these ‘punishing financial sanctions’ were imposed. No acknowledgement that it was Hamas’s genocidal attacks on Israel that caused these sanctions to be imposed. No awareness of the absurdity of blaming the violence on the ‘desperation’ caused by sanctions when a) it is plainly a power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, b) the Palestinians were given the opportunity to turn Gaza into a flourishing society two years ago, but within hours showed how ‘desperate’ they were not to achieve this by destroying millions of dollars’ worth of greenhouses that the Israelis had left for them to make money from, and c) Hamas is demonstrably not despairing at all but exultant that it can now tyrannise the inhabitants of Gaza all the way back to the 7th century.

But what are facts when journalists have absorbed the narrative of a death cult as their own and allowed it to frame their moral compass? A listener wrote this complaint to the BBC about The World Tonight last night:

With Hamas and Fatah fighting each other and committing dreadful human rights violations, you had four interviewees on the programme and each one of them said it was all the fault of Israel and the West. Not one of the four suggested that the Palestinians might be in any way at fault or pointed out that Western aid has continued to pour into the territories since Hamas’s election. Whereas under Fatah the aid mostly ended up in Swiss bank accounts, since Hamas’s election it has mostly been spent on arms. Not only was the programme grossly unfair, but it is ultimately demeaning to the Palestinians and could even encourage the fighting. Militants can confidently make life hell for their people in the knowledge that the BBC and other influential media outlets will blame Israel.

And on Newsnight last night, Gavin Esler suggested that the fact that in Lebanon there was trouble, in the West Bank there were problems and in Gaza there was chaos was all Israel’s fault. So let’s get this right: when Israel is in occupation, it is blamed. When it is not in occupation, it is blamed. And above all, when it is the victim of genocidal assault, it is blamed for being the cause of regional instability. The fact that Israel is actually the principal victim and target of that instability is turned on its head. The fact that it is indeed now hemmed in by a pincer of annihilation in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank shows, to the BBC mind, that it is Israel that is to blame — for the ‘trouble’, ‘problems’ and ‘chaos’ besetting its attackers!

Absolutely incredible.

It’s not just the BBC. Channel Four News, assorted newspapers, magazine pundits — they’re all peddling the same murderous rubbish. Their minds are simply programmed to a lie, and everything is seen through the prism of that lie. In the Telegraph, one of the few journalists to have resisted the madness, Con Coughlin, administers the increasingly rare antidote of actual facts:

Pro-Palestinian campaigners frequently claim that the main reason Gaza is in crisis is that the economic blockade imposed by America and Israel following Hamas’s election victory has reduced the civilian population to penury. This was the essence of the argument advanced by Alvaro de Soto, until recently the UN’s special co-ordinator for the Middle East, who seems happy to blame anyone for the Palestinians’ plight except the Palestinians themselves. Ordinary Palestinians, it is true, in both Gaza and the West Bank, are suffering hardship. But this is not because of a lack of funds entering the Palestinian territories: it is because successive Palestinian administrations have made no effort to distribute the resources available equably among the population.

Hamas, on the other hand, sees economic deprivation as a form of political oppression. The World Bank reported that donors contributed about £375 million to the Palestinian territories in 2006, twice the amount they received in 2005. But since taking power, Hamas ensures any funds are spent on Islamic causes and its 6,000-strong militia, leaving the majority to fend for themselves. The bonus for Hamas is that, by forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, it succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place.

Don’t understand — or won’t understand? Our quisling media are doing the filthy work of the enemies of the free world for them. It is truly beyond belief.

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