15-Aug-13: To promote something truly hideous, can't do better than adopt the BBC's approach

Screen shot from Yolane Knell's "I was there" BBC report

Over at BBC Watch, they posted an insightful article yesterday entitled "BBC’s Knell reports on prisoner release without mentioning their crimes".

It starts with this question:

What are the millions of viewers of BBC television news being told about the recent early release of 26 men convicted of murder, attempted murder or accessory to murder? This filmed report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell was broadcast on BBC television news as well as appearing on the Middle East page of the BBC News website.

The question gets answered by a review of what the BBC's witless presenter does to frame the indefensible - the walking-free of 26 murderers long before they have served their sentences and long before they or their society have acknowledged the horror of the offences that put them behind bars.

Confronted with the challenge of explaining to a worldwide audience how unrepentant terrorists can be received into the arms and adulation of a society that simply adores the killing and murdering they do, and that includes their political leadership, the BBC's on-the-spot correspondent engages in reporting of part-facts, non-facts and un-facts. As BBC Watch says:

Quite what Knell and her colleagues ‘consider’ people who have engaged in the premeditated murder of women and pensioners (and who most definitely do have blood on their hands, as proven in a court of law) to be besides terrorists is not a moot question.  But critically Knell’s use of language – which is clearly intended to promote the idea of moral equivalence between the perception of these prisoners as “heroes of the Palestinian cause” and the all too obvious fact that they engaged in violent acts of terrorism – is particularly disingenuous – and downright ridiculous – when her words are broadcast against a background of images of masked gunmen and flags of terrorist organisations such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the DFLP. [BBC Watch]

Needless to add (since our readers are well tuned in to this sort of insight), the BBC report entirely fails to explain to its audience (a) how the non-negotiable demand for killers of children and aged pensioners to be released from prison is a step towards peaceful relations between two societies in conflict; and (b) what the killers actually did in order to end up behind Israeli bars.

Moreover the utter failure of any of the BBC's global experts to critically look at how peace can ever be done between parties when one of them erects cultural edifices in homage to terror even while demanding pay-off before walking into the conference room speaks volumes for the partial, ideological and non-objective analysis the BBC routinely serves up on the Israel/Arab conflict.

But more depressing still, to our minds, than the way the BBC spins this (not a new phenomenon) is the non-response it evokes from the citizens of the UK who, by the billions of pounds annually, fund lethal journalism of this kind.