Rewriting story

[peter42y]

BBC web page about six day war.


news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6709173.stm


My comment .

I apologize for my English. I am Portuguese.
BBC coverage of the anniversary of the 6 day war does illustrate BBC sick anti Israel stance.
At my side I have a book ( Dictionary D`histoire Universelle) published in 1968 , just after the war. How does the dictionary published by Editions Universitaires describe the war ? They talk about the clashes that had been happening for years in Israel's borders with Jordan and Syria.. They wrote Arab League did start a virulent propaganda campaign against Israel. Next they say Egypt closed the straits of Tiran. Finally they mention the demand of Egypt of withdrawing UN forces from Sinai.Israel was surrounded they claim. War became inevitable. 40 years later BBC editor Jeremy Bowen completely does twist the facts and does turn Israel into the culprits .
In the article " How 1967 defined the Middle East" , Jeremy Bowen Israelis are called victors..,Occupiers.
Israel, Israelis are defined as Victors..,occupiers..;No mention of Arab threats to destroy Israel. No mention of Egyptian demand that UN troops should be withdrawn from Sinai ( as they were) . No mention of Egyptian blockade of a Israeli port. Such twisted coverage does tell volumes about BBC sick hostility toward the Jewish state.
Thanks God , in my desk , I have the French dictionary published 40 years ago that does give a much more clear picture how events took place back in 1967.

2

In the BBC website about the 6 day war nowhere can be seen the historical facts that actually lead to the war. No wonder. Nasser vowed to annihilate Israel . Egypt did blockade the gulf of Aqaba. Egypt demanded the withdrawal of the UN force from Sinai. None of these facts would portray Arabs in a favorable light. So BBC ignored them. In a website commemorating the 40 year after the war there is not a single page highlighting the facts that did precede the war.Instead BBC does choose to turn peoples attention to the so called occupation and the dire consequences of the war.
Just imagine that when commemorating the anniversary of WWII , some news network did focus its attention to the consequences of the war, (instead of its causes ) as BBC does in the case of 6 days war.
That news network would ignore all events that lead to the war ( invasion of Austria , invasion of Czechoslovakia, military buildup of Germany ) and instead would highlight events after the war .., ( the division of Europe after 1945.., and the Berlin Wall).
If events were portrayed in such a way , actually allies (and not Hitler) would be the ones to blame for all the tensions in Europe after world war II.
Thats exactly what BBC does .
The kind of coverage BBC does of the 6 days war if applied to Germany in world war II would turn Germans into victims and allies into the culprits.

After all allied victory in Europe brought the division of the continent.., 5 decades of cold war..., the arms race and so on.

BBC is dishonest since an historical event should not be seen in the light of does happen afterward but should be placed in the context of what did happen before.

It does not make sense to judge world war 2 focusing in what did happen afterwords. If one
does want to give a fair account of world war II one should see what did happen before and what did lead to it.

[steevo]

Yes well put Peter. I got the impression he was sorry the Arabs did not destroy Israel: the poor Palestinians and their humiliating defeat. He makes the Arabs as a victim Goliath and Israel as the calculating ready-and-waiting Goliath. The fact is Israel beat Egypt because they preempted them and attacked before they would be attacked. They were smart because they knew their survival was at stake. If they didn't preempt then the air war could have been very different, and the ground war with a major advantage for the Arabs may not have been able to have been stopped.

Brown frames the victory:

"The conviction that it was a miracle, that God saved the Jewish people and reunited them with their historic homeland in Judea and Samaria, is still the driving force behind Israeli religious nationalism.

"When the messianic moment of victory combined with Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier, the result was the settlement movement."

In fact it was a buffer zone as well as land reclaimed that the victor rightfully won against an enemy that would have their total destruction.

[peter42y]

Hi.
Here is how a Israeli Journalist, Yoel Marcus , did live the moments preceding the war .

(From Haaretz article called Five Comments on the situation )


As Haaretz's correspondent in Paris, I was at the Israeli Embassy when half a million people rallied in the streets to show their solidarity with Israel. There was a sense that the Arabs were about to wipe out the Jewish state. On television, people saw Egyptian troops marching into Sinai; they heard Nasser's warmongering speeches. Ahmed Shukeiry, the secretary of the Arab League, declared that the Jews of Israel would be sent back to the countries they came from and native Israelis would be slaughtered. Among the celebrities who showed up at the embassy to express their solidarity, the one who most touched our hearts was pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who wept aloud and infected everyone with his morbid prediction that Holocaust II was on the way. What those now denouncing the 40th anniversary of the occupation do not understand is that the Six- Day War was the most justified war Israel ever fought - because it knocked out of the Arabs' heads the idea that Israel could be destroyed by force.

End of quote