Isn't Google good!

I have had a significant increase in traffic to my site over the past few days and on investigation it seems that the increase was due to one of the maps contained in this article from July last year. That article was about the BBC deliberately misleading people as to the countries that border Gaza. Here's what I wrote then:

'In the BBC article headlined 'Israel forces 'kill two militants in central Gaza'', the BBC include this map

This map makes it seem as though Israel is both enormous and surrounds Gaza thus explaining how Israel has been able to blockade it for some years now. There is of course a problem with this - Israel does not surround Gaza. The country that borders Gaza to the South East is Egypt not Israel, that is where the Rafah Crossing is...

So why have the BBC omitted the word Egypt from that first map? If the BBC come back and say it was an unfortunate accident due to the scale of the map I will not believe them...'

Coincidentally I raised the same issue just over a week ago. There seems to be a pattern emerging.  In fact on perusing my blog I also found this article from June 2010 that included a different but similarly misleading map, here's the relevant extract:

'The BBC and other media claim that Israel has sealed Gaza off from the outside world. This is a map of Gaza from the BBC website...
Note that both Gaza and Israel are clearly marked. What is not marked is the other country that borders Gaza to its South-West, Egypt. Egypt has a 11km border with Gaza through which as much aid or even trade could pass as Egypt wants. The BBC often claim that Israel 'controls' the crossings into Gaza. If Egypt wanted t open its border to Gaza it could do so but it does not want to. The Egyptians know what sort of government is in power in Gaza and what they want to achieve. Hamas and its colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood want to see the destruction of Israel but their view of Egypt's future is not one that the Egyptian government approve of.'

The BBC's anti-Israel stance is well documented on this blog and others. Their refusal to release the Balen Report and their spending of, so far, around £300,000 on legal argument to keep it secret hardly inspires confidence in their lack of bias. So I hope that people looking for a map of Gaza also found some interesting information re the BBC, Israel and Gaza.