BBC Bias on 'Aid' Convoy Raid

[Teddy Bear]

As soon as I heard the news regarding the incident of the Israeli raid against the so called 'humanitarian aid' convoy intending to break through the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt against Gaza, I knew immediately what kind of way the BBC would present it. True to form they ran the story exactly as I would have predicted.

Now bear in mind there is video evidence filmed from the helicopters flying overhead that shows the 'humanitarian activists' of one of the ships attacking the soldiers with clubs, iron bars and knives upon their landing. It also shows them throwing a soldier off the top deck, and using the Israeli weapons against the soldiers.
Even before the soldiers landed they came under attack.

Israel did offer before any conflict to offload the convoy in Ashdod and transport all aid supplies overland to Gaza with the activists accompanying it. This was rejected.

Since Israel pulled its troops and settlers completely out of Gaza in 2005 giving the Palestinians independence there, Hamas used the gesture to fire hundreds of rockets across the border that it managed to smuggle in. Therefore it was certain that Israel would have no choice but to impose a blockade in an effort to curtail the smuggling , which even Egypt on its side did the same. Even so Israel has continued to provide humanitarian aid to residents there, as well as provide necessary medical aid to those deemed in need of it.

Now which 'humanitarian' activists wouldn't accept Israel's right and need to control its borders and prevent as much as possible the smuggling of weapons and rockets into Gaza? Clearly not those humanitarians who consider Israelis as humans. If these 'peace activists' were interested in peace, wouldn't they have agreed to have their 'humanitarian' supplies transferred in a peaceful way to Gaza?

But of course that was nothing to do with their real purpose, which was to provoke an incident, knowing full well that Israel would have to launch a raid against them to prevent their breaking through the blockade. Later, night vision equipment, bullet-proof vests, and rifle scopes were found among the 'humanitarian' supplies, as well as large quantities of cash ready for transfer to Hamas. Exactly what 'starving' people require for sustenance.


Somehow for much of the media, this no-brainer situation is used to further the militant Islamist propaganda and demonize Israel. Even though though there is actual video evidence to show exactly what happened there, they manage to twist the story around.

Here's an example of how the BBC do it.

Witnesses cast doubt on Israel's convoy raid account

Eyewitness accounts from ships raided by Israeli commandos have cast doubt on Israel's version of events that led to the deaths of at least nine people.

German pro-Palestinian activist Norman Paech said he had only seen wooden sticks being brandished as troops abseiled on to the deck of the ship.

Israel says its soldiers were attacked with "knives, clubs and other weapons" and opened fire in self-defence.

The raid led to widespread condemnation and the UN has called for an inquiry.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that Washington would support an Israeli investigation of the raid, but said it must be "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent", as called for by the UN.

Activist Norman Paech: "There were no knives, no axes and no pistols"
The six ships, carrying aid and campaigners, had sailed from Cyprus in a bid to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Later on in the article this Norman Paech claims only to have seen 2 and a half wooden batons being used. I'm not exactly what half a baton looks like. Point is, there is video evidence to show what the activists were using, why does the claim by this self-interested individual 'cast doubt' on what Israel declared had happened? So much so that it makes the headlines.

Israel seized more than 670 people with the ships and deported 50 on Tuesday. The Israeli cabinet later announced that all those still being held would be deported within 48 hours. 'Act of piracy'

Speaking as he arrived back in Berlin wrapped in a blue blanket, Mr Paech, a member of a German opposition party, said Israel's operation "was not an act of self-defence". "Personally I saw two-and-a-half wooden batons that were used... There was really nothing else. We never saw any knives.

"This was an attack in international waters on a peaceful mission... This was a clear act of piracy," he added.

Mr Paech had been a passenger on the Turkish passenger ship Mavi Marmara where most, if not all, of the deaths occurred.

Fellow German activist Inge Hoeger said they had been on the ships "for peaceful purposes".

"We wanted to transport aid to Gaza," she said. "No-one had a weapon."

She added: "We were aware that this would not be a simple cruise across the sea to deliver the goods to Gaza. But we did not count on this kind of brutality."

Activist Bayram Kalyon, arriving back in Istanbul, had also been a passenger on the Mavi Marmara.

"The captain... told us 'They are firing randomly, they are breaking the windows and entering inside. So you should get out of here as soon as possible'. That was our last conversation with him."

Meanwhile, in Nazareth, Israeli Arab MP Haneen Zuabi - who was on the flotilla - told a press conference that Israeli forces began firing while still in the helicopters hovering over the ships.

"We are calling for an international committee to investigate this tragedy," she said.

Diplomatic sources in Ankara have said at least four of those killed were Turkish. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the assault was a "bloody massacre" and must be punished. He said Israel should not test Turkey's patience.

Further criticism of Israel came from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday.

In an interview with the AFP news agency, he said Israel's blockade of Gaza was responsible for the deadly raid.

"Had Israelis heeded to my call and to the call of the international community by lifting the blockade of Gaza, this tragic incident would not have happened," he said.

Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called on Israel to release people and boats it had seized.

He spoke after an emergency meeting of Nato ambassadors in Brussels called by Turkey.

Following the Israeli sea-born raid, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ordered the border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to be opened.

The Rafah crossing has been closed since 2007, although special medical cases are occasionally allowed through.

The Egyptian state news agency said the latest opening was to allow humanitarian aid through. It is not clear how long it will be kept open.

The UN Security Council issued its statement after deliberating through Monday night.

It said an investigation should be "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent". It also condemned the "acts" which led to the deaths.

Barbara Plett, the BBC's UN correspondent in New York, said the statement was the result of a compromise between Turkey and the US, Israel's closest ally.

In its defence, Israel released footage showing soldiers landing on the Turkish ship and being apparently attacked.

Captain Aria Shaliker of the Israel Defense Forces, who was part of Monday's operation, says the commandos began the raids armed with paintball guns.

"I was, myself, on one of the boats, the Israeli boats, approaching the flotilla," he told the BBC's World Today programme.

"It is true that the Israeli commander unit... came on board with paintball weapons... in order to disperse [people] if there was violence. They were ready for a violent... demonstration on board the flotilla, especially on the big boat, the Marmara.

"No-one really expected that there would be such a violent outcome of what happened.

"First, you know, the soldiers tried to disperse, but in the end when they were shot at, you know when there was shooting... from the other side, there's no other way than turning from paint ball to live ammunition."

The Israeli government has accused the activists of having links to Islamist groups.

Of the 679 activists brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod, only 50 agreed to be voluntarily deported and more than 30 are being treated in hospital for their injuries, reports the BBC's Wyre Davies in Jerusalem.

That means that almost 600 people, from several countries, are still being held in detention centres across Israel and being questioned by the authorities.

So the technique is to first put every opinion forward that goes against the evidence, and right of Israel to protect its borders, and present the explanation given by Israel as an excuse given after.

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie Phillips in The Spectator also picks up on the BBC purposeful ignorance of reality to present their own desired view of events.

The alternative universe of the western left
Sunday, 6th June 2010

Any rational and fair-minded individual who has been following the unfolding of the Turkish terrorist flotilla saga – the video proof that the Israeli marines only started using live ammunition to prevent themselves from being lynched, kidnapped and murdered; the fact that the same Israeli tactics resulted in six out of the seven boats in the flotilla landing peacefully in Ashdod; the fact that the Mavi Marmara was stacked with al Qaeda-related Islamists who declared they were bound for ‘martyrdom’ before they set out; not to mention the fact that in Gaza, Hamas actually refused to accept the flotilla’s ‘humanitarian aid’ that was the ostensible purpose of the voyage – anyone assimilating all this would doubtless have felt, watching the BBC1 Andrew Marr show this morning, that they had strayed into a parallel universe from which reason had totally departed.

First off on the sofa discussing the morning papers was David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. Despite declaring himself to have ‘great affection’ for the State of Israel, he nevertheless proceeded to denounce it for having procured a ‘catastrophic ...disaster’ – and distinguished himself by roundly declaring that ‘the occupation is the problem’. Remnick doesn’t seem to realise that Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended in 2005; that’s why it had to stop this possible shipment of weapons out at sea. Duh! What sort of idiot is this? And of course, Marr didn’t correct him. Maybe he doesn’t know either?

The flotilla episode is only a ‘catastrophic disaster’ because of the reaction to it by people like Remnick, Marr -- and Marr’s first guest, the newly defeated former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Now Miliband was on ostensibly to talk about Labour’s leadership race, in which he is a prime contender. Yet Marr invited him first of all to opine on the most important topic seemingly on either or both of their minds, the one that drives out everything else, the Big Obsession on the left. Israel was still defiant, marvelled Marr. It wouldn’t – couldn’t – occur to him that, far from defiance over its reprehensible behaviour, the facts were actually on Israel’s side. How could they ever be? Impossible!

And so Miliband – whose tenure at the Foreign Office was marked by a dramatic escalation in British government hostility and malice towards its ostensible ally in the Middle East – energetically took the opportunity to depart altogether from Planet Reality. It was a ‘disaster’ for those killed and injured, he frothed, and for Israel. Whoa! Really? Since when did British politicians conclude that killing Islamic jihadists in self-defence to prevent them from lynching, kidnapping and murdering your own soldiers constitutes a ‘disaster’? Does Miliband think that the killing of thousands of Taleban, not to mention Afghan civilians, is similarly a ‘disaster’ for the Taleban or for British and American forces doing the killing? If not, why the double standard?

The flotilla episode, Miliband went on, was merely the latest in ‘a series of deadly and self-defeating actions’ by successive Israeli governments. Really? Such as Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005? Such as the offer to Abbas last year by former Prime Minister Olmert of virtually all the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem? Ditto by Barak in 2000? Or was he thinking of Israel’s military attempts of last resort to stop the Hamas rockets or Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli citizens? Because for Miliband, any use of military force by Israel to defend itself against attack is simply not permissible, whatever the circumstances.

Of course Israel should lift the blockade, spluttered Miliband; there could be no peace when Gaza was isolated and unable to obtain the basic commodities of life. And then the final threat, doubtless parroting the thinking of Miliband’s admirer across the pond, Hillary Clinton –that the political process to bring about a Palestinian state now has to be ‘jump-started by outside forces’.

Thus in Miliband’s alternative moral universe, Israel is to be punished for defending itself against attack. Its sovereign ability to protect its own security would be taken away by America, Britain and the EU, who would impose upon it (how?) a set of measures which would hand the final weapon to its would-be destroyers with which they could achieve their exterminatory aim – and worse. For far from Miliband’s claims, the blockade was imposed with western agreement in order to isolate and weaken Hamas, rightly thought to be a threat to the region and therefore to the west, as well as to protect Israel from the smuggling of weapons.

And as for Gaza being unable to obtain the basic commodities of life, just look at the pictures above and below (hat tip:Tom Gross, Arutz Sheva) to see that this is the opposite of reality. Indeed, there is some grim amusement to be had from the attempts by western correspondents to square the undeniable reality of Gaza’s absence of a humanitarian crisis with the political imperative – without which their reporting of the Middle East makes no sense – that there is one.

Thus the incoherent report in today’s Sunday Telegraph, in which some of these truths sit alongside Hamas propaganda that has been swallowed wholesale. For example, it repeats the canard that Operation Cast Lead killed

over 1,200 people, many of them civilians

whereas in fact most of these were Hamas operatives; yet it also quotes Khalil Hamada, a senior official at Hamas's ministry of justice, saying;

‘There is no starvation in Gaza...No-one has died of hunger.’

A similar article in the Washington Post makes this even clearer:

Gazans lament where they can't go more than what they can't buy. They also decry the lack of employment -- with no building supplies and few trade possibilities, joblessness is rampant. Once an exporter of fruits and other goods, Gaza has been turned into a mini-welfare state with a broken economy where food and daily goods are plentiful, but where 80 percent of the population depends on charity. Hospitals, schools, electricity systems and sewage treatment facilities are all in deep disrepair.

Yet if you walk down Gaza City's main thoroughfare -- Salah al-Din Street -- grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs smuggled in from Egypt. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.

‘When Western people come, they have this certain image of Gaza,’ said Omar Shaban, an economist who heads Pal-Think for Strategic Studies in Gaza. ‘We have microwaves in our homes, not only me, everybody. If you go to a refugee camp, the house is bad, but the people and the equipment are very modern. The problem is the public infrastructure.’

That there is hardship in Gaza is indisputable. But that is caused solely by the fact that it is at war with Israel --waged by a regime that also imposes great hardship and suffering upon the Gazans themselves. The flotilla activists and their supporters, however, continue to maintain that Gaza is starving and that their purpose was to bring in supplies that don’t exist because of the blockade. That is a lie -- serving to promote and widen the ultimate Big Lie about Israel which is causing so many in the west, including leading politicians and journalists, so spectacularly to take their leave of reality altogether.