A Case Study in Propaganda: A day in the life of the BBC campaign against Israel

De website "Bad News from the Netherlands" is een parodie op hoe een aantal Nederlandse journalisten de ontwikkelingen in Israel beschrijven door goed nieuws weg te laten.

De uitstekende Engelse auteur Robin Shepherd (van het boek "A State Beyond the Pale") heeft onlangs de website van de BBC geanalyseerd en gevonden dat er alleen maar negatieve berichten over Israel op staan. Wat voor Bad News from the Netherlands (uitleg) een parodie was, is de realiteit van de BBC.

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Here is a list of all of the headlines about Israel which are up on the BBC website’s MidEast section right now:

“Netanyahu cancels US nuclear trip” [A developing story about the ongoing spat between Israel and the Obama administration]
“Israel lifts espionage gag order” [A story about failed Israeli attempts to silence a former soldier who leaked documents to the press about "assassinations"]
“Israel is a ‘threat’ says Turkey” [A story about how Israel ruined its relationship with a former "ally" after Cast Lead]
“Jail for Israeli Arab ‘gym spy’” [A story about an Israeli Arab sentenced to six years for spying on an Israeli general at the gym where they both worked]
“Israel blames troops for deaths” [A story about the Israeli military admitting its soldiers unnecessarily killed four Palestinian demonstrators]

There are also two features about Israel on the same page. Here are the headlines:

“Thais labouring on Israel’s farms” [A story about how Israel now uses Thais as cheap labour since the Palestinians are stuck behind the "wall".]
“Jerusalem Diary: Cairo views” [A diary piece ostensibly about life in Cairo which quickly descends into the publication of Holocaust denial and a reader comment saying that denying the Holocaust should not be regarded as anti-Semitic".]

Someone should do a larger study. But today’s evidence is clear. Every single article paints Israel in a negative or problematic light. One, quite nonchalantly, gives a voice to Holocaust denial. None paints the Palestinians in a negative light in any way shape or form.

That is quite an achievement in a week when the Jerusalem Post — a paper freely available to BBC editors on the internet — has run a story with the following headline:

“Israel slams naming of Ramallah street after arch-terrorist” [A story about how the Palestinian Authority -- Israel's partner for peace -- has named a street in honour of Yehiyeh Ayash, a terrorist who murdered dozens of Israeli civilians]

That story comes hard on the heels of a decision in March by the same “moderate” Palestinian Authority to celebrate the worst terrorist atrocity ever perpetrated inside Israel (the 1978 bus massacres which left 38 dead including 13 children) by naming a central square in Ramallah after its perpetrator, Dalal Mughrabi.

The BBC refused to cover that story too.

This is not journalism. It’s agitprop. And it’s got to stop.
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Robin Shepherd

Please feel free to verify of all this by clicking on the BBC website here. All of the above was correct at 0830 GMT today.

Bron: Robin Shepherd OnLine Think Tank Blog