A moral failure of UK media on Gaza

The genocidal Israeli military campaign against the unarmed, imprisoned and besieged people of Gaza which has resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Palestinian and just 13 Israelis, is not being accurately reported in the British press.

With a few admirable exceptions, writers and broadcaster in the UK have adopted a biased stance and vocabulary in their coverage of the conflict. The highly influential Zionist lobby and the Labour Friends of Israel within the UK government have been hard at work.

One must not underestimate the career damage journalists, politicians and academics fear in the event of being branded 'anti-semitic'. Most do not have the moral courage to unreservedly criticise Israel.

The Israeli state's latest innovation, Hasbara, has also been highly effective. The department of 'spin' has produced the litany of stock phrases found in every interview with Israelis and has an army of 'ordinary people' who shower targeted outlets (including the Guardian, the BBC and Facebook) with expressions of support for Israel.

Even now, as international pressure to charge Israel with war crimes mounts, the British media is careful to include the 'Israeli point of view' in every report on the subject. Last Thursday, for example, the Times wrote about Israel's white phosphorous attacks on the UN's Gaza city headquarters, explaining that the use of proscribed unconventional weapons contravenes the Geneva Convention. The piece ended with the contextually irrelevant but often reiterated claim that Israeli's aggression is in retaliation for the 'militant rocket fire from Gaza that has terrorised hundreds of thousands of Israelis'.

Hamas rockets, themselves a far more justifiable 'retaliation' for the illegal imprisonment and abuse of 1.5 million people within the Gaza strip, are just one of the strategic misrepresentations of truth proffered in defence of Israel.

Hi-tech, devastating Israeli bombardments are regularly described as 'defensive', whilst Hamas' paltry rocket attacks are 'terrorism', 'provocation', the sole cause of 'conflict escalation'. There are almost as many pictures of damaged Israeli roofs in Sterot in the papers and on television here as there are of the mangled bodies of Palestinian children.

UK journalists and broadcasters habitually refer to the 'war' in Gaza, but in the 21st century, a 'war' requires each side to have an army, an air force and a navy. Only the Israelis have these things. The Palestinians have stones.

Another often repeated line is that the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005 as a gesture of peace and good will, leaving it to become a prosperous 'Singapore' of the Middle East for the Arabs to enjoy. Few writers dare mention the fact that Israel retained and remains in total control of Gaza's borders, checkpoints, airspace, sea, power, water and even electro-magnetic frequencies, making Gaza the world's biggest concentration camp. For the first time in history, innocent civilians are unable to flee from bombardment because they are imprisoned within the battleground.

Israel is held up as the sole beacon of 'democracy' in the region. That Hamas was legally elected, that the Palestinian parliament is unable to convene because the Israelis will not allow Gazan MPs to travel to the West Bank and vice-versa remains untold.

Scant respect

In the service of the Israelis, there is scant respect for statistics - Melanie Philips, in a January 5 column for the Daily Mail, for example, claimed that Al Aqsa intifada 'killed thousands of Israelis' (even the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed no more than 920). Victoria Ward, writing on January 12 in the Daily Mirror, spoke of '900 deaths on both sides' suggesting an equal loss of life rather than a massacre.

Editorial imbalance prevails. On January 13, BBC Radio 4's flagship Today programme (one of the most influential shows in Britain with 6.1 million listeners), described how British MPs re-assembled after their winter break in a 'rare show of unity' over Gaza, backing Israeli aggression and condemning Hamas, whom the Foreign Secretary David Milliband described as 'murderers'.

Hansard [the official record of all Parliamentary proceedings] paints a very different picture. The majority of MPs who spoke actually condemned Israel's 'brutal and utterly disproportionate blood-letting', as Michael Meacher MP described it and variously called for the expulsion of the Israeli Ambassador from London, the withdrawal of the British Ambassador from Tel Aviv, sanctions against Israel and the immediate cessation of arms sales to Israel.

The Israeli Ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, wrote or was mentioned in 40 newspaper items during 2008 according to Arab Media Watch (AMW). In the same period his Palestinian counterpart, Professor Hassassian, was mentioned only twice. Notwithstanding, on December 24, Prosor published an article in the Daily Telegraph complaining of media bias against Israel. And yet, at least 150,000 British people marched in solidarity with the besieged children of Gaza in London last Saturday. The spectre of the Nazi holocaust which so affected previous generations is being replaced by the present reality of Israel's holocaust in Gaza and a new grass-roots groundswell of sympathy for the Palestinians.

The powerful Zionist lobby may exercise unreasonable constraints on the media here, but it is losing control of public opinion.

Abdul Bari Atwan is the editor of Al Quds Al Arabi.

The British newspapers have been consistently condemning of the violence in Gaza. However Mr Atwan's partiality is evident in his article.
Stef
Paris,france
Posted: January 17, 2009, 03:17