Our once-respected news sources are so dishonest
Ian O'Doherty
Independent.ie. November 5, 2007

It's always hard to see something you used to respect and believe slipping into a mire of mediocrity and dishonesty. But it's something that cannot be ignored.

This has certainly been the case with the BBC, where the recent phone-in scam has shocked only those who haven't noticed the bias and dishonesty of their newsroom.

It's a newsroom where someone like Orla Guerin who has been exposed as lying about the total destruction of the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil by the Israelis during the war last year, among other things, can still keep her job.

And now that other bastion of self-regarding liberalism, The Guardian, has been exposed as playing equally fast and loose with the facts when it comes to Israel.

In last Thursday's edition, The Guardian's Seamus Milne wrote about Gaza and the suffering of the people there.

That the citizens of Gaza are suffering is not under any doubt -- the deprivations brought about by the civil war between Hamas and Fatah have wrought terrible consequences on the locals.

But according to Milne: "This week the collective punishment of the people of Gaza reached a new level, as Israel began to choke off essential fuel supplies to its one and a half million people in retaliation for rockets fired by Palestinian resistance groups."

Milne then went on to incorrectly state that: "Israel continues to control all access to the Gaza Strip," conveniently forgetting the Egyptian side of the border.

But while The Guardian has form on this issue (blithely anti-Israeli and utterly myopic when it comes to the issue of Islamic terrorism), to describe the constant rocketing of Israeli towns like Sderot, which is currently the most regularly bombed town in the world, as being carried out by "Palestinian resistance groups" is the kind of fatuous rubbish which we have come to expect from professional liberals.

Referring to the homophobic, misogynistic, murderous savages of Hamas as "resistance fighters" is particularly nauseating. As is the suggestion that Israel should simply accept the rocket attacks on their towns and the mortar attacks on their roads and the shooting of their border patrols.

What other country in the world would be expected to tolerate such hostile acts and not retaliate?

The reason why enough humanitarian aid is not getting through to the locals is because their masters, Hamas, keep attacking the access routes into Gaza. And yet this is all meant to be Israel's fault.

Milne even goes so far as to say: "Unless Hamas recognised Israel, renounced violence and signed up to agreements it had always opposed, the western powers insisted, the Palestinian electorate would be ignored. No such demands, needless to say, have been made of Israel."

This is the kind of moral equivalence and weasel words observers in the region have come to expect.

The Israelis have not been asked to renounce violence or embrace democracy because it is already a democracy which only uses violence to defend itself.

To liken a group like Hamas, with their pavement executions and battering of women who don't wear sufficiently "modest" clothing, to the only democracy in the region is not just reckless it is positively wicked.

It has always been a genuine mystery to me how liberals, and particularly feminists, can embrace a culture that treats women and minorities with murderous contempt while condemning the one country within hundreds of miles where women and minorities are treated equally.

This bizarre double-think and reflexive hatred of Israel and America can be seen in the words of kidnapped reporter Alan Johnston.

Talking about his ordeal, Johnston claimed that: "Whatever else it was, my Gazan incarceration was not what Iraqi prisoners had been forced to endure at Abu Ghraib jail."

That may or may not be the case, but surely a more appropriate comparison would have been to the murdered kidnap victims Daniel Pearl, Ken Bigley et al?

But on Planet BBC, a reporter like Johnston can openly claim to be "a friend of the Palestinian people" and still be considered unbiased.

Having an opinion is not the problem.

Many of my friends have completely opposite views on the issue of Israel and we manage to get along anyway. No, the problem is the wilful misrepresentation of the facts.

The likes of Guerin and Johnston are reporters, and are meant to keep their private views private. That's the difference between them and someone like, for instance, the appalling Robert Fisk who, to his credit, at least makes no pretence of non-bias.

With Fisk, and others on the opposite side of the debate, you know what you are getting and you can choose to either accept or deny it.

But with the BBC we have been conditioned to accept what they say as unbiased gospel, even when someone like Johnston has openly declared his affiliation in the region.

It seems that deceiving children who phone Blue Peter is the least of their sins.

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