The BBC and the axis against Israel
by Melanie Phillips:
There’s an unholy alliance between Muslim Jew-haters, the left and the political class.
The Conservative MP Andrew Percy has accused the BBC of putting British Jews directly at risk through its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Absolutely. The BBC’s relentless portrayal of the Israelis not as the victims of genocidal terror but as hard-hearted, vengeful and wanton killers of children and the innocent has channelled ancient antisemitic tropes of Jewish blood-lust and helped fuel an enormous increase in attacks on Jews.
As Percy said, the BBC’s double standards on Israel, treating patently absurd civilian casualty figures from Hamas as reliable while casting doubt on Israeli statements, present Israel rather than Hamas as the aggressor and rogue actor.
A principal offender has been the Today programme presenter, Mishal Husain. Interviewing the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps on Monday, she unleashed a barrage of distorted and out-of-context quotes to demonise Israel as a bloodthirsty aggressor.
Claiming that the IDF spokesman, Rear-Admiral Daniel Hagari, had said in October that “our focus is on creating damage not precision,” and that Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, had said “we will eliminate everything” in Gaza, Husain said these remarks suggested Israel wasn’t acting within international law and might be why “so many Palestinians have died”.
Yet as the Guardian acknowledged on 5 December, Hagari had been mistranslated. He had actually said: “While balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage”.
Gallant’s words have been taken out of context. He had said: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before, and Hamas will not exist. We will eliminate everything”. He meant eliminating Hamas, not Gaza’s civilians.
In any event, what matters is not what’s said but what Israel does. For the ratio of civilians to combatants killed by Israel is around two to one.
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