The bias is in the wording

The BBC report on the Pope's meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. From the beginning you can sense the disdain in which he is held by the BBC (my emphasis):

"Israel's right-wing new Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has held talks with Pope Benedict on the pontiff's visit to the Israeli town of Nazareth.

TV cameras were allowed to capture the two men sitting down together but the talks themselves were private.

Pope Benedict repeatedly has called for a separate Palestinian state during his tour of the Holy Land.

Mr Netanyahu has not committed himself to the principle of two states, which past Israeli leaders have accepted.

His election this year was ill-received in the Arab world because of his hard-line views, including his opposition to returning land captured in wars. "

Where to begin? "right wing" is BBC code for "wrong, wrong, wrong" if not "evil". Then Benjamin Netanyahu is described as having "hard-line views", is this a phrase that is ever used to describe President Ahmadinejad or the leaders of Hamas or the Palestinian Authority or are they models of flexibility? Finally this "land captured in wars" begs the question "who started the wars" and the answer that in each case Israel was responding to an attack or an imminent acknowledged attack.


One report that I read this week that I don't believe the BBC have covered was that:

"Hamas will accept no less than a fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, the group's political leader in exile said Saturday.

Khaled Meshal, who lives in Syria, called a two-state solution unacceptable because Hamas cannot envision living with Israel in peace and security.

Meshal spoke Saturday at a news conference, following a gathering of several Palestinian factional leaders in exile, reported KUNA, the Kuwait news agency.

Hamas envisions a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 border with Israel, with Jerusalem as the capital, all Jewish settlements dismantled and full sovereignty over land, air and water, Meshal said."

I wonder if the BBC chose not to report that speech as it would have gone against their "narrative" that Israel is the block to peace and that the Palestinians want a two state solution. In fact Hamas have a very clear aim their Charter calls for the replacement of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with an Islamic Palestinian state. That same Charter quotes the Koran :

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

As I reported last month:

"Saudi King Abdullah - whom President George W. Bush kissed and to whom President Barack Obama bowed earlier this month -- has blamed Israel for terror attacks in Saudi Arabia: "We can be certain that Zionism is behind everything ... I don't say 100 percent, but 95 percent." [Saudi 1 Television, May 2, 2004]

Grade 9 children in Saudi Arabia are taught that "the hour [of judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind rocks and trees, until the rocks or the trees say, 'O Muslim! O servant of God! There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!"

Earlier this year, the head of the Department of Islamic Studies at Saud University pronounced that "Jews are the enemies of Allah." Dr. Walid Al-Rashudi also prayed for the extermination of all Jews: "Kill them one by one and don't leave even one." [Al-Aqsa (Hamas) TV, Jan. 12, 2009.

It is the very existence of the Jews, not their actions or even their Zionism, that fuels the rhetoric of many Islamic political and religious leaders.

"If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. . . . They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing," said Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub.

". . . You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth." [Al-Rahma TV (Egypt), Jan. 17, 2009]

Is this any different from Ahmadinejad's calls for a world without Israel?

And look at Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, depicted by the West as a moderate to whom Israel is supposed to offer statehood. But the TV channel directly controlled by Abbas's office regularly runs educational programs to teach Palestinian adults and children alike that there is no state called Israel, and that all Israel's land is actually "occupied Palestine."

Palestinian children are taught that Israeli cities throughout the entire country - from Haifa in the North, to Jaffa (part of Tel Aviv), to Eilat in the south, are all actually Palestinian cities. Videos feature songs about a "Palestine" that erases Israel and a future when the Israeli cities Jaffa and Haifa will be "liberated."

Hamas, which has convinced many Western leaders and journalists that it spends more time building schools than bombing civilians, broadcast a sermon earlier this month depicting the Jews as enemies of humanity, inherently evil, seeking to rule the world and a dangerous threat to Muslims.

"The time will come, by Allah's will, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of this earth." [Hamas (Al-Aqsa) TV, April 3, 2009]

Why is Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial so passionately denounced when Palestinian Holocaust denial is so utterly ignored? Hamas TV broadcast a special documentary last year, explaining that the Holocaust was a Zionist scheme to rid the world of elderly and handicapped, and to gain world sympathy. Fatah's PA TV broadcast a children's program that said explicitly that Israel burned Palestinians in ovens.

So why is Abbas presented as a peace partner, Egypt as a peace broker and Abdullah as a friend of the West? Why does the world not react with outrage to calls for "extermination" of Jews from anyone other than Ahmadinejad?

If the West is serious about peace, then all hatred must be condemned. And we must recognize that the real enemies of peace are not only the Ahmadinejads of the world, but the "friends" who have mastered the doublespeak of calling for peace in English while inciting hatred in Arabic."

In January I reported on another "sermon":

"We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world - except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews - even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."


That is from a sermon delivered by Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris and broadcast on Palestinian Authority television shortly before Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Do you believe that Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris will be satisfied by a return to the 1967 borders? Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris and his ilk want all Jews dead, they say so again and again (and quote the Koran to justify their views) whilst most of the world just ignores the words and blames the Israelis for the problems of the Middle East.

Is there any chance that the BBC will ever report the speeches of Palestinian leaders or would that contradict the BBC's agreed "narrative" on the Middle East?

So why won't the world listen to what Muslim political and religious leaders say to their own people as well as what they say to the outside world? Why do the BBC and others prefer to spread the lie that Israel is against peace whereas the Palestinians want peace?