BBC's Bowen 'Interview' Gives Hamas Leader Free Rein

[Teddy Bear]

Both Honest Reporting and BBC Watch have produced criticisms of this pure propaganda, so called interview, by Jeremy Bowen at the BBC on behalf of Hamas. I'll copy the Honest Reporting one here, but I advise everybody to read the one too at BBC Watch with far more detail and background.

BBC Interview Treats Hamas Leader With Kid Gloves

Is this the BBC’s idea of an April Fool’s Day joke? Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen interviews Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and gives the terror chief a free platform to make some laughable statements that go virtually unchallenged.

A couple of nuggets:

Netanyahu is the most extreme leader. And the one who likes to shed blood the most. That is why we are expecting difficult times. It is the responsibility of the international community to put a stop to his stubbornness, and Israeli extremism. …

Israel with its extremist leadership has killed the peace process, the two-state solution and every opportunity for a political solution for the Palestinian cause. …

The Palestinian people are in a movement for national liberation. It is a just cause and it is certainly not terrorism. Quite the opposite; the Palestinians have been the victims of Israeli terrorism for decades. I condemn any side that is practicing extremism and killing based on identity or affiliation. …

We are an active resistance with a just cause battling the occupier. We have a moderate ideology and an open mind. Others practice violence under the name of jihad, which we condemn.

Meshaal even has the gall to compare his “resistance” to that of Nelson Mandela, George Washington and Charles de Gaulle fighting Nazi occupation in World War Two.

If Bowen really wants to get to the heart of what Hamas, a genocidal and anti-Semitic terrorist organization, stands for, perhaps he might consider asking Meshaal about the Hamas Charter, which indicates that Hamas has anything but a “moderate ideology.”

Instead, Jeremy Bowen and the BBC have allowed themselves to become nothing more than a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda, which Bowen’s so-called accompanying analysis does little to dispel.

[thehighlandrebel]

edgar1981.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/jeremy-bowen-in-new-bbc-interview.html

[Teddy Bear]

It pretty much sums up the mindset of Bowen

I notice in the 'interview' Meshaal expresses his desire for Israel to return to pre 1967 borders. In fact this wouldn't make any difference to the present border of Gaza as far as Israel is concerned. The only difference would be that Gaza then was controlled by Egypt whose present government have deemed Hamas to be terrorists.

Might be an idea for Israel to put Gaza under Egyptian control again. That would be the end of Hamas, and I doubt there will be any BBC journalists reporting from there while Egypt is 'sorting things out'.

Naturally Bowen didn't make any of this clear, either in the interview or analysis, he wants Mashaal to reserve his hotel suite for the next conflict.

What a piece of scum he is.

[thehighlandrebel]

Egypt are already targeting Hamas positions in Gaza but don't expect the loony left to be calling for boycotts and sanctions against the Egyptians.
The cowards and terrorist appeasers in this country don't seem to realize that when terrorists groups are threatening your population the only way to prevent it is to attack them. It appears that Israel is sharing information about the location of Hamas terrorist positions with the Egyptians so maybe some kind of alliance can be formed...not just to protect Israeli and Egyptian civilians but to ultimately save the lives of the Palestinians themselves.

www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Report-Egypts-army-is-planning-to-attack-targets-in-Gaza-327769

[thehighlandrebel]

More fans of Bowen

daphneanson.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/pimping-hamas-propaganda-bbcs-bowen.html?spref=fb

[Teddy Bear]

Good spot THR

[charmbrights]

The Economist Espresso via e-mail for Wednesday April 1st

The plaintiff: Palestine joins the ICC

Today Palestine becomes a member of the International Criminal Court. It has already prompted the court to begin investigating Israel’s war in Gaza last summer, and also wants it to look at the construction of settlements in the West Bank. Both Israel and America—neither of which are ICC members—protested when Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, signed the Rome statute in December. But the Palestinians say they have no other option to influence Israel. The latest round of negotiations between them broke down last year; the Americans themselves are increasingly frustrated by the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s recently re-elected prime minister. Yet the ICC could also be used against Palestinian leaders—in particular, by other Palestinians: Mr Abbas may seek to prosecute officials from Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza. Rather than yielding justice for victims of the region’s most protracted conflict, Palestine’s membership could turn the ICC into yet another forum for its rifts and spats.

This piece is noteworthy for two reasons:
1) It shows the anti-Israel bias of the Economist, and
2) It shows the inherent bias of the ICC which treats Fatah as a government.

[Teddy Bear]

Good piece Charm.
So long as organisations, many politicians, and much of the media think demonising Israel to appease Islamists serves their cause it will continue.

[Teddy Bear]

I don;t know why this author for the Spectator took so long to comment on this interview but it's a good article.

Why wasn’t the head of Hamas properly cross-examined during his BBC interview?
Tom Wilson 10 April 2015 13:26

When journalists have the much sought after opportunity to interview the heads of states and organisations with appalling human rights records the very least we expect is to see such people given a thorough cross-examining. What we don’t expect is for heads of terrorist organisations to be provided with a platform from which to give the equivalent of a party political broadcast and to get away with it virtually unchallenged. And yet that is precisely what we got when the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen recently interviewed Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas.


Hamas leader Meshaal warns of Israeli ‘extremism’ after elections, reads the baffling headline that accompanies Bowen’s interview. Think what you like of Israel’s Netanyahu, but it is a little much to hear the head of a violent Islamist organisation making allegations about other people’s extremism. Rich indeed to have Hamas complaining about the outcome of the Israeli elections when, since Hamas seized control of Gaza back in 2007, not only have the militants never held any elections of their own, they have quite systematically murdered and driven out most of their opposition in Gaza.

Still, Meshaal clearly wanted the message of Hamas’s supposed moderation to be the main takeaway from the interview, and Bowen didn’t get in his way. Along with comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and George Washington — unchallenged of course — Meshaal was also eager to register his opposition to Isis.

But that hardly makes Hamas moderate. Al-Qaeda has opposed Isis. Hezbollah and Iran’s Ayatollahs have all been waging the most almighty war against Isis. None of these people are moderates. Yet the closest that Bowen came to challenging Meshaal on this was to remark that there are plenty of people who would ‘laugh’ at the notion that Hamas is moderate.

In his accompanying analysis Bowen suggests that Hamas would accept Palestinian statehood along the 1967 lines, which he argues puts them in agreement with recent statements from the White House chief of staff.

That of course is to ignore everything else that Hamas actually says and does. Not least the fact that Hamas has made clear that accepting the ’67 lines would only ever be part of a temporary truce along the way to achieving the wider goal of obliterating Israel. This, and not the improvement of life for the Palestinian people, is the core objective of the Hamas charter; a document that calls for the killing of all Jews and that states plainly ‘There is no negotiated settlement possible. Jihad is the only answer’.

While Bowen insinuates that there is no daylight between the White House and Hamas positions, it is worth keeping in mind that the White House has not been rebuilding Gaza’s offensive tunnel systems, nor training Palestinian adolescents in some eighteen new terror training camps, nor test firing long-range rockets into the Mediterranean. But in recent weeks Hamas has been doing all of those things.

We’ve seen Bowen doing this kind of thing before. During last summer’s war in Gaza he went as far as to write in the New Statesman ‘I saw no evidence of Hamas using Palestinians as human shields.’ Perhaps he didn’t. But plenty of other journalists documented the firing of rockets from built-up civilian areas at the time. Worse still, UNRWA found that several of its humanitarian facilities had been used by militants for the storing of munitions, while more recently Amnesty International documented the launching of attacks close to sites where civilians were taking refuge. Hamas’s use of civilian shields was widely known about at the time, and regardless of what Bowen himself saw, why use words that cast doubt on all these other reports?

We might have expected to see Meshaal questioned about some of this in the interview. At the very least we should have seen him asked about Hamas’s treatment of Palestinians and the brutal public execution of Gazans alleged to be Israeli collaborators. Because letting Hamas off the hook does nothing to help the people who live under its fanatical rule. The only people it can possibly help are those who wish to harm Israelis.

[thehighlandrebel]

More from Bowen. According to him the persecution of Christians in the region may be Israels fault.

honestreporting.com/bbcs-bowen-palestinian-christians-threatened-by-what-the-israeli-government-might-be-doing/

[Teddy Bear]

Good spot THR.
He's absolutely outrageous. Given the mostly silence about the persecution of Christians in Islamic regimes or by their 'holy warriors', he decides to pick on the one nation in the whole area where a Christian is safe. As Honest Reporting point out in their article, he doesn't actually explain why. It's his idea of 'balance', if he ever has to criticise Muslims he has to make sure he criticises Israel too, regardless of whether there's any merit to it.

BBC’s Bowen: Palestinian Christians Threatened by “What the Israeli Government Might be Doing”

Fresh from his kid glove interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, turns his attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

In a feature on BBC Radio 4 on April 14, Bowen discusses how the rise of radical Islamism, particularly in the form of Islamic State and similar organizations, has led to an exodus of Christians from the region.

At the very end of his analysis, which you can listen to by clicking below, Bowen includes the following:

Palestinian Christians as well feel threatened, not just of course from extreme Islam, but they also feel threatened by what the Israeli government might be doing.

What exactly might the Israeli government be doing? The program segment comes to an end before we can find out but Bowen has planted just enough of a seed of prejudice to leave the uninformed listener associating Israel with the persecution of Christians.

This could not be further from the truth but since when has that mattered to Jeremy Bowen when it comes to Israel?