[DEBATE] : BBC from bad to worse

[Hein Marais]

April 16, 2009
The Independent
Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC?
The BBC Trust is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which abused  
Bowen

The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle  
East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and  
ethically dishonest.

But I am mincing my words.

The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about  
the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual  
Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that  
Bowen was wrong to tell the truth.

Let's go step by step through this pitiful business. Zionism does  
indeed instinctively "push out" the frontier. The new Israeli wall –  
longer and taller than the Berlin Wall although the BBC management  
cowards still insist its reporters call it a "security barrier" (the  
translation of the East German phrase for the Berlin Wall) – has  
gobbled up another 10 per cent of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" that  
Arafat/Mahmoud Abbas were supposed to negotiate. Bowen's own brilliant  
book on the 1967 war, Six Days, makes this land-grab perfectly clear.

Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim  
was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine. Why else are  
Zionists continuing to steal Arab land for Jews, and Jews only,  
against all international law? Who for a moment can contradict that  
this defies everyone's interpretation of international law except its  
own?

Even when the International Court in The Hague stated that the Israeli  
wall was illegal – the BBC, at this point, was calling it a "fence"! –  
Israel simply claimed that the court was wrong.

UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 called upon Israel to  
withdraw its forces from territories that it occupied in the 1967 war  
– and it refused to do so. The Americans stated for more than 30 years  
that Israel's actions were illegal – until the gutless George Bush  
accepted Israel had the right to keep these illegally held  
territories. Thus the BBC Trust – how cruel that word "trust" now  
becomes – has gone along with the Bush definition of Israel's new  
boundaries (inside Arab land, of course).

The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached  
the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from  
the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only  
sensible view of the war".

Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's  
claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another  
"sensible" view of the war. The BBC Trust – and I now find this word  
nauseous each time I tap it on my laptop – says that Bowen didn't give  
evidence to prove the Jewish settlement at Har Homa was illegal. But  
the US authorities said so, right from the start. Our own late foreign  
secretary, Robin Cook – under screamed abuse from Zionists when he  
visited the settlement– said the same thing. The fact that the BBC  
Trust uses the Hebrew name for Har Homa – not the original Arab name,  
Jebel Abu Ghoneim – shows just how far it is now a mouthpiece for the  
Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen.

Haaretz gave considerable space to the BBC's findings yesterday. I'm  
not surprised. But why is it that Haaretz's top correspondents – Amira  
Hass and Gideon Levy – write so much more courageously about the human  
rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever  
dared to do? Whenever I'm asked by lecture audiences around the world  
if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon  
more than they should ever believe in the wretched broadcasting  
station. I'm afraid it's the same old story. If you allow yourself to  
bow down before those who wish you to deviate from the truth, you will  
stay on your knees forever.

And this, remember, is the same institution which said that to  
broadcast an appeal for medicines for wounded Palestinians in Gaza  
might upset its "neutrality". Legless Palestinian children clearly  
don't count as much as the BBC's pompous executives.

How do we solve this problem? Well I can certainly advise viewers to  
turn to Sky TV's infinitely tougher coverage of the Middle East and –  
I admit I contribute to this particular station – I can recommend the  
courage with which Al-Jazeera English covers Gaza and the rest of the  
Palestinian-Israeli war.

I can well see how BBC executives will say that this article of mine  
today is "over the top". Jeremy Bowen may indeed think the same. But  
the First World War metaphor would be correct. For Bowen and his  
colleagues are truly lions led by BBC management donkeys.