Proof of the BBC being the Arabs' friend.

[Teddy Bear]

Another great observation by Melanie Phillips, first on media bias in general in reporting the Jericho jail abduction by the Israelis, which if you haven't heard, vilifies Israel - surprise surprise. But pay particular attention to the event concerning Palestinian armed gunmen who stormed the German media offices in the same building that the BBC also have their offices. Consider that the Palestinians have ransacked both the British Council, and HSBC buildings, and one can see the high regard these thugs have for the BBC.

March 16, 2006 Myths and reality (2)

This apparently authoritative account in Ha’aretz appears to be what actually happened in Jericho:

According to government sources, Israel has complained repeatedly over the last year that the Palestinians were violating the 2002 agreement. One complaint, accompanied by a threat of Israeli intervention, was even submitted in writing. However, as long as the British and Americans were there, Israel refrained from acting, out of fear that they would be injured.
Then, a few weeks ago, Hamas leaders began saying that they planned to release the Jericho prisoners. Mofaz threatened that if that happened, Israel would re-arrest them. But what finally sparked Israel's operational preparations was when the Palestinian Authority began releasing Islamic Jihad operatives from jails in the territories, and, at about the same time, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said that the PA should consider freeing the Jericho prisoners as well.

Last Wednesday, the British and American consuls in Jerusalem sent a letter to Abbas informing him that they were canceling the 2002 agreement. The Palestinian Authority never fully implemented the agreement, the consuls charged; it ‘consistently failed to comply with core provisions of the Jericho monitoring arrangements regarding visitors, cell searches, telephone access and correspondence. Furthermore, the Palestinian Authority has failed to provide secure conditions for the US and UK personnel working at the Jericho Prison.’

Moreover, the letter implied, Hamas's electoral victory has made the situation even worse: ‘The pending handover of governmental power to a political party that has repeatedly called for the release of the Jericho detainees also calls into question the political sustainability of the monitoring mission.’ They therefore gave Abbas an ultimatum: Either implement the agreement in full, at once, or reach a different agreement with Israel. And should he fail to do either, ‘we will have to terminate our involvement with the Jericho monitoring mission and withdraw our monitors with immediate effect.’

Israel was informed that the British and American jailers would leave Jericho by March 15, but other than that, government sources said, there was no coordination between Jerusalem and Washington and London. Tuesday morning, while Olmert and Mofaz were campaigning in Ariel, they were notified that the British and Americans had left. At that point, the IDF operation began.


It is clear, therefore, that the fault lay with the Palestinians for breaching the agreement. They were warned about this by Britain and the US, who also warned them that if nothing was done to repair this breach and improve security they would have to withdraw their monitors. They informed Israel they would leave by March 15, when they duly left.

The result was mayhem, violence, and kidnapping of Europeans by the Palestinians, who burned down the British Council offices and ransacked an HSBC bank. They also blamed the British for leaving and for ‘collusion’ with the Israelis. In other words, they broke an agreement showing no regard for due process of law or security, ignored warnings about their behaviour, blamed Britain for protecting its own people from their lawlessness, manufactured a spurious conspiracy against themselves and responded to the entirely reasonable action taken against them by behaving like thugs.

For this, many British and European journalists blamed... Israel, for seizing the men suspected of terrorist atrocities who had been shielded by the Palestinian Authority and never brought to justice. Well, there’s a surprise.

So where were the few journalistic voices of moral integrity? Virginia Blackburn wrote in the Daily Express:

But does the world thank Israel for capturing a known terrorist and bringing him to justice? No, it does not. Instead, you’d have thought Israel itself was in the wrong. There’s the usual tutting about heavy handedness and upsetting the rest of the Middle East, much of which, if truth be told, wants to see not only Israel but also the West smashed to smithereens. Not that you would gather that listening to some people, especially those on the Left: in their eyes, nothing Israel does can ever be right...
The reason for this appalling attitude, alas, is because Israel is a Jewish state. Anti-Semitism is as strong as it ever has been: it’s just that, after the events of 60 years ago, most anti-Semites have been shamed into shutting up. So they take out their disgusting little prejudices by blaming Israel for all the world’s problems instead. They should wise up. Israel has, more than once, saved our ungrateful necks. It is Israel that stopped Iraq from becoming a nuclear power by bombing its armaments factories, and the way things are going, it looks as if it may do the same to Iran, too. And will it be praised by a world it has made safer? You guess.

In the New York Sun, Daniel Johnson wrote:



The capture there of Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and five other PFLP terrorists will go down in history as one of Israel’s most remarkable military operations, comparable to the Entebbe raid or the abduction of Eichmann… Under the circumstances, it is astonishing that only one prisoner and one guard were killed – proof that Israel wanted their quarries alive, to stand trial.

To judge from the Heinz Kiosks at the BBC, however, you would think that Israel, the United States, and Britain were entirely to blame for the violence that erupted across the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday. Palestinians burned down offices of the British and US cultural missions, as well as the European Commission, in Gaza City and Ramallah, kidnapped Westerners at random, and threatened further reprisals.

The British network’s leading anchorman, Jeremy Paxman, interviewing the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, in his usual aggressive style, was visibly astonished that a leftist Israeli in the midst of an election campaign would offer warm support to a right-of-center government. Mr. Paxman apparently couldn’t get his head round the idea that Israel had acted within its rights, because the Palestinians had never kept to their side of the agreement, and could not sit idly by while the assassins of their cabinet minister were set free to strike again.


Johnson also refers to an interview on the BBC Radio Four Today programme yesterday (0720) which was a little cameo of BBC and British establishment prejudice. Thus Jim Naughtie, talked about

...the crisis which has been caused by [my emphasis] the Israeli storming of the jail in Jericho...
which caused his interviewee, the Conservative MEP Edward Macmillan Scott, to say

The crisis wasn’t actually caused by the Israelis taking the prisoners...
but then go on to say

...it was caused by the US and the UK military withdrawing the cover they provided to that prison for some four years as part of an international agreement...
No, that wasn’t the cause either; the cause was the Palestinian breach of that agreement putting the UK and US monitors in danger. But not one scintilla of criticism of the Palestinians escaped Mr Macmillan-Scott’s lips; quite the contrary:

...[the US and UK breaking of the agreement] was very shocking to the Arab world and to others... it was shocking to me…Mahmoud Abbas had a very difficult time...
Which prompted Naughtie to venture that perhaps it was the Palestinians who had broken the agreement; to which EM-S replied:

...the situation in Palestine is not very orderly...people around President Abbas are very angry indeed.
Uh-huh. Would that be the same President Abbas who had previously indicated he was minded to release the Jericho prisoners, in breach of the agreement?

A propos the BBC, Tom Gross points out a curious and fascinating fact:

Armed gunmen also raided the offices of the German TV station ARD, shooting in the air. But what is interesting is that the BBC is housed in the same building as ARD in Gaza, and yet the Palestinian militant groups – who are much better organized and more sophisticated in their choice of targets than some in the media would have us believe – deliberately did not enter the BBC offices. It seems that even on a day of widespread attacks on western targets in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian gunmen know who their friends are.
And they have another comrade at the Guardian, where Seumas Milne (fisked here by Adloyada) wrote:Jack Straw has brought Britain's standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds to its lowest point for half a century. By withdrawing British monitors from a Palestinian jail in Jericho on Tuesday, the government as good as handed over to Israel the prisoners it had made an international agreement to protect. In doing so, it colluded with its American co-sponsor and - at the very least tacitly - with the Israeli occupation regime in an armed attack on the prison and the seizure of an elected political leader regarded by many Palestinians as a national hero.
As the ruins of the British Council building in Gaza smoulder, the foreign secretary can reflect on his contribution this week to peace in the Middle East: the humiliation of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, the undermining of efforts to form a viable Palestinian administration and the confirmation in Arab and Muslim eyes that Britain cannot plausibly be regarded as an honest broker in the region.


You couldn’t make it up.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh characteristically pares away the multiple layers of self-deception to expose a wry reality:

Ironically, the IDF operation against the murderers of tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi will make life much easier for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas's Prime Minister designate Ismail Haniyeh. Ever since he was elected as chairman of the PA more than a year ago, Abbas has been under immense pressure to release Ahmed Saadat, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and his colleagues...
The last thing the new Hamas regime wants is to alienate the international community over a bunch of communist activists suspected of involvement in the assassination of an Israeli minister. In addition, Hamas did not consider the PFLP, a tiny group, a major partner in the new coalition.

For the past four years, the case of the Ze'evi assassins was a source of headache for the PA. Many Palestinians were unhappy with the deal that resulted in their transfer to a Jericho prison and accused former PA officials of conspiring with Israel and the US. The case was also threatening to bring more trouble for the Hamas cabinet. Now both Hamas and the PA have good reason to stop worrying about the fate of Saadat and his friends.


Another crazy episode in the tragic farce that is the Middle East impasse and its response by the moral imbeciles of the western intelligentsia.